Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: Making of America http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek: naos].
4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
TITAN.
2 vols. 16mo.
FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.
2 vols. 16mo.
LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION.
1 vol. 16mo.
THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS.
1 vol. 16mo.
HESPERUS.
2 vols. 16mo.
LIFE OF JEAN PAUL.
By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
1 vol. 16mo.
The above are published in uniform volumes by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
HESPERUS
OR
Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
A BIOGRAPHY
FROM THE GERMAN OF
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS
"The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God,—the camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world,—the coast of God's creation,—a vaporous halo around a better sun,—the numerator to a still invisible denominator,—in fact, it is almost nothing at all."
Selections from the Papers of the Devil.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
Cambridge.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator. This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence" Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus, and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of Goethe and Schiller,—the latter of whom (as will be well remembered) tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being, like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in the closing paragraph of his second Preface, the author so touchingly pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also received for some time valuable aid.
Newport, R. I.
PREFACE
TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,—the first that of the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this third again a long one,—and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining ones of future editions,—I do not see how a reader of these latter can get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery: he will die on his way to the book.
I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert," will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to throw both of these very words, which in the latest[[1]] he brings forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained behind,—their echo, or words?
Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property of cultivated Europe—e. g. of music, of philosophy—into vernacular ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a political Purist of Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political speech-purifier, or pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,—as some philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their native air,—still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers, which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language, and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians, who—e. g. Alexander von Humboldt—import the whole Latin Linnæus into the midst of our language, without any other German signs of distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers. For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third, improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or Es's, in compound words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the Dog's-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses for right of possession.
Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "Morgen-Blatt letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a thorough-going examination, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,) but first of all for a comprehensive reading of them, which, to be sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact before it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add sublime, when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the fore-echo of his personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"—"with a sigh of painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"—mere sentences of intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to speak it.
For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too, cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods of life, least of all the poet.
The best wedded love is not what the maidenly was; and so, too, is there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are so innocent and good; and all blossoms come so pure-white into the world, in which by and by,—as Goethe says,[[2]] even of material colors, "The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself, nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers, more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
And so, then, may this Evening Star—which was once the morning star of my whole soul—run its third circuit around the reading world in the fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease, while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover—the paper with organic globules and layers of phœnix ashes, that whole brilliant pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I address myself, and thou myself like a Quaker, and order myself about a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface. It is headed:—
ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION OF HESPERUS.
"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the Book.—Joke in the beginning.—Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.—The conclusion from the reflection.—Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens: That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo), appears only as a black spot.—(In your copy-book of letters you must have made numbers of such allusions.)—The world expects that the Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer, or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its right bearings.—Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest wax cakes, but no honeycomb.—No one so very much resembles as pedants do the magpies, which are at once thievish and garrulous: they dilute and filch.—Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely, the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the diarrhœa.—Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who announce loss and gain."—
This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life, and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our mouths the same goutée over and over again, under the appearance of six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of brilliants,—and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which, fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery, and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.—
Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assafœtida were thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only to the greater part of them.—
"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[[3]] bosoms, and backs at the present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and heads, unpicked.—It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise, because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless spots.—Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught and boiled in the moulting-season."—
This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except the year of birth.
"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may see just what you are.—One expects from the Preface to a second edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the register!—
With pleasure!—First, I have corrected all typographical errors,—then all slips of the pen,—then many cacophonies of language,—moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,—the jurist, theological ones,—the physician, both,—the mathematician, all of them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?—The woman is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for coldness in books, as in cakes of chocolate, he holds to be proof of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the purport of the one which he really despatched.—To which opinion shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?—Most properly to his own, as the world to its own.—
For the rest, my little[[4]] work can hardly see so many printed editions as I have arranged of written and improved ones in my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story itself, therefore,—even supposing I had forgotten that it is a true one,—there is little to change for the better, because the work is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,—which I easily explain by the want of episodes,—that the moment I take out from the first story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise, just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about it, that in its case this cannot be done.
However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic changes and improvements by true enlargements of it through historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any others.
My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.—Heaven grant it! I have slim hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that I had—although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in my Pantheon-Pandemonium—still, however, at least hung them farther apart.
"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical grafting-knife rather than the weeder!"
I just said that I have done so.
"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is taken with a reverse movement,—in short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),—make believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest, and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,—and therefore at the end of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"—
Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!—How could I remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[[5]] fragments of my Evening Star, which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?—And how hard and cold must the soul be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or third, into which it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings, and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands in the second world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become brothers?—
Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye as a rainy star,—only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the moonlight of poesy for the morning of truth, and dismiss too early its morning dreams!—But into the torture-chambers and through the prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves, some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.—Nay, and if I ever grow too old, then comfort me also!
Hof, May 16, 1797.
PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
PREFACE.
I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle, and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in order to turn out hollow from the casting. I was on the point, even, of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great, thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle, and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild, masculine ones.—
But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I not rather in the first line address those readers, and take them by the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?—Come, dear, weary soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into my Evening-Star and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me the longer and deeper ones.—And as to thee, loftier man, who findest our life, which is passed only in a glass, darkly, less than thyself and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up, that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around Vesuvius, morganic fays and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries, and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"—
But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as lightning does man, destroys, but not disfigures; to thee, noble spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and sucks the blood of victims!"—And yet I have thought of thee all through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining maul-stick[[6]] of my weary hand.
As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore present only the
First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days," until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the Homoiomereia[[7]] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable little human bodies; and the
Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the critics only, not to anticipate me in their fugitive leaves,[[8]] which they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have only once. And finally the
Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[[9]]
CONCLUSION.
And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus—Thou needest a little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have completed thy orbit!—Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star, never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of this year!—Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst be an Evening-Star to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one a morning star. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his antiquated recollections into hopes!—Cool off the fresh youth in the early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!—But for me, Hesperus, thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed, which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms, disquieted with ignes fatui, all veiled from each other, every one alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand of a friend, which he holds in the dark.—
Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find—the dreams again, because he has lost nothing but sleep.—
The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new men.—
And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[[10]] stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.—
Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.—
But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their antics; the living dream.
JEAN PAUL.
In the Vernal Equinox, 1794.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
[1. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.—Rat-Battle-Pieces.— Nocturne.—Three Regiments in future Breeches.—Couching-Needle.—Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
[2. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Antediluvian History.—Victor's Plan of Life.
[3. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Sowing-Day of Joys.—Watch-Tower.—Fraternization of the Heart.
[4. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Profile-Cutter.—Clotilda's Historic Figure.—Courtiers, and a Noble Man.
[5. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Third of May.—The Nightingale.—The Abbate sitting on Music.
[6. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Threefold Deception of Love.—Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.— Churching.—New Concordats with the Reader.
[7. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Great Parsonage-Park.—Orangery.—Flamin's Promotion.—Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.—Rain of Fire.—Letter to Emanuel.
[8. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.—The Studious Honeymoon of a Scholar.—The Cabinet of Natural History.—Answer From Emanuel.—The Packed-up Chin.—Arrival of the Prince.—First Intercalary Day.
[9. DOG-POST-DAY.]
A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.—A House without Walls; a Bed without a House.
[10. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Bee-Master.—Zeusel's Oscillation.—Arrival of the Princess.
[11. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Transfer of the Princess.—Smuggling of a Kiss.—Montre à Regulateur.—Simultaneous Love.
[12. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Polar Fantasies.—The Singular Isle of Union.—One more Bit from previous History.—The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.—Third Intercalary Day.
[13. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Concerning his Lordship's Character.—An Evening of Eden.— Maienthal.—The Mountain and Emanuel.
[14. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Philosophical Arcadia.—Clotilda's Letter.—Victor's Confessions.
[15. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Parting.
[16. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Potato-Form-Cutter.—Drag-chains in St. Luna.—Wax Embossments.—Chess according to the Regula Falsi.—The Thistle of Hope.—Escort to Flachsenfingen.—Fourth Intercalary Day.
[17. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Cure.—The Prince's Palace.—Victor's Visits.—Joachime.— Copperplate Engraving of the Court.—Cudgellings.
[18. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Clotilda's Promotion.—Incognito-Journey.—Petition of the Majors of the Chase.—Consistorial Messenger.—Caricature of the Flachsenfingeners.
[19. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.—Clotilda in Victor's Dream.—Extra Lines on Church-Music.—Garden Concert by Stamitz.—Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.—The Heart without Solace.—Letter to Emanuel.
[20. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Letter from Emanuel.—Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.—Walk to St. Luna.—Fifth Intercalary Day.
[21. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Victor's Professional Visits.—Concerning Houses full of Daughters.—The Two Fools.—The Carrousel.
[22. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks, and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.—Marie.—Court-Day.— Giulia's dying Epistle.
[23. DOG-POST-DAY.]
First Visit to Clotilda.—The Paleness.—The Redness.—The Race-Weeks.
[24. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Rouge.—Clotilda's Sickness.—The Play of Iphigenia.—Difference between Plebeian and Patrician Love.—Sixth Intercalary Day.
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
[1. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.—Rat-Battle-Pieces.— Nocturne.—Three Regiments in future Breeches.—Couching-Needle.— Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,—the other disliked it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been one heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally, of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel (Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it, if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the window-curtains, and without having even the frisure of her hat, or of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against Tuesday,—although he said least, because he could not talk and had only recently been baptized,—was to be carried to church on Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[[11]] among the savans of earth, and got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,—a regular ball-room and plaza de armas of the same,—and of these the Chaplain wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts. It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go, that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?... For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,—the accent must fall on the first syllable,—or Sebastian, by abbreviation Bastian, as the Eymanns called him,—or Victor, as Lord Horion, his father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just as my prose-prosody requires,)—Horion had, through the Italian Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region, and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly, he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account would be scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father, however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at once moral blinders and eye-glasses, and guided his vision while he sharpened it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen, who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people, to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the Doctor's head-piece,—that Pluto's helmet, which makes, not, like the mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,—and thrust on his finger the Doctor's ring,—that ring-of—Gyges, which only to others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of Göttingen?
His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;—fine tournaments and watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;—besides, we have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[[12]] a hair-bag,—and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters, drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,—how he once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and true friend Hain,[[13]]—how he would often, after a child's baptism, post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they wept,—and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;—for with them and courtiers wit itself is caprice;—they cannot approve that Victor should love to descend to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a Frenchman would rather creep upward to people of ton. For women, who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to what is artistically so,—folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable gusto,—merely because he made believe to himself that all this intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design. In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it, one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed, is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part, and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the administration), and exalt, in perfect silence—behind the dropped curtain of my face-skin—the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to ourselves sweet thoughts without ennui, why shall not another be suffered to awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son was (for Victor always called her his mother),—how he relied upon her in all things,—how he was always sporting without ever teasing anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest strangers,—and how she could open before him better than to any matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,—Zeusel he writes himself,—once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case of lachrymal fistula, because he thought that no eyes could weep but diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are lined with affrighted ones clinging to the twigs, and despairing ones clinging to the leaves, that, in such a life, where not only follies, but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,—a fragrant leaf-skeleton,—sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that he would—for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way—remove the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments, and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assafœtida and stuff the parsonage with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay, it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent rosewood-oil."
He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact, that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain, sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;—he himself stood in the background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir, while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, en passant: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in limbo,—if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only wonder was how he continued alive,—he alone was the one, and no devil beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats in peace,—and was himself very much so.
In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and Country, 1785, recommends this course."
His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin, and see what he is doing therein. Nothing,—but out of it he is at this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of pent-up storms—(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his velvet-knee cleaner than he)—could not possibly lie longer on his pillow,—he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender emotions and dreams;—its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill, on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times. He cursed and thundered at all his passions—to be sure with passion—which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder—" Ashamed at his self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend exactly as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher than the commercial treaty of self-interest, the social contract of civility, or even than the boundary and barter agreement of love, such a one,—but I wish he had never ordered me from the publisher!—whose withered heart knows nothing of the Unitas Fratrum of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and sorrow—But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too, and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the coucher.
The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring, the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and whenever it is created, not by the "four faculties," but by greater ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and streams like a drag-net,—when the clouds, pressed down by their weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,—when in one quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each other and exchange places,—who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor, with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its blue opening over our heads....
The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys nothing about the whole thing except—May-butter, and from his mouth, amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but—spittle, and both, because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his throat and stomach.
As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes, but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,—that is to say, with porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add, that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new yellow balls,[[14]] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the muskets,—I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,—unless I leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;—with a round hat, with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and attacked him with intent to destroy,—less from hatred than from love. It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms, face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a second,—the first utterances were their two names.
The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck, around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love; he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long therein, and made all good again.
With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,—for Spring had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,—the two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom, laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal. Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army, "to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely, to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces, because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons, gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more on their bodies than in them, namely, anything at all. In our days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary of equipment and provisioning,—but in fact there are discreet ones,—first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are; secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[[15]] of two equally virtuous youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted, because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and, thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls, cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,—the people advantageously fall into two classes of paupers,—the protected and their protectors; and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
When my three beloved personæ at length arrived in front of the parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after them from Flachsenfingen,—the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother, and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four Englanders—not foreigners, but horses—came trotting up. Now for the first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was; and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty for the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic attack had deprived of his speech.
I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father, Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings, who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile, the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and lied to him quantum satis; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a dolum bonum, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber. Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes, which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling. Only the veiled Briton,—a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely, like a high mountain over a torrid zone,—he offered to the filial hand a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to the grave or no farther than this minute....
Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens of the cataract—that smoke-ball[[16]] and cloud cast over creation—down into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son. Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a son and a slave of the dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart! And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[[17]] ah, how little earth it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me, the light is painful! Was it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping, then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any longer;—he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and when he felt on his trembling breast the quicker beatings of his father's heart, and the tighter embrace of his gratitude,—then was the best child the happiest,—and all rejoiced at his joy, and congratulated the son more than the father....
Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this History dead.
For now it is actually gone,—not a word, not a syllable of it do I know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;—the Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better things to do and to lay open now, namely,
THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning; but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,—in fact, at the Equator, for I reside on the island of St. John's, which lies, as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely surrounded by the principality of Scheerau. For nothing can be less unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book (the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times), than my latest home product, the Invisible Lodge,—a work, the reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an island,—namely, the isle of St. John's, on which I now live and write.
The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title, Dog-post-days.
It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore Island,[[18]] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those wing-casings of growing Spring,—the plain and coast around me looked like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered and hid in vales and bushes round about,—the moon lay as yet behind the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the whole rim of heaven,—the blue sky was at length pierced with silver spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was looking only at the heavens,—when something plashed on the earth....
It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean, and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
"To his Well-Born,
Superintendent of Mines,[[19] ]Mr. Jean Paul,
on
Free.
St. John's."
This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which intoxicated me still better,—a package of letters. Savans, lovers, people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters; business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with kings and emperors;[[20]] and that there were few mining intendants of my stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon and the Möser[[21]] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical department, but then what flattery!)—that every one who possessed a life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,—that it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had already passed into another lane,[[22]] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness, only then bring up the rear with the final flourish, that modesty forbids them to say more, when they have already said everything that modesty can forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"—he writes more copiously, but I abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed beast of a rat,—"to establish everything for me by documentary evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not wholly to be trusted,—in time he will explain everything to me,—for this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof, but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;—accordingly the epistolary Spitz will regularly swim back and forth as a poste aux ânes,[[23]] but I must not on any account sail after the postman; and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself Knef, "shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that, instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which, again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere Declinatorium[[24]] of our perpetual horizontal deviations from the cold pole of truth, and an Inclinatorium[[25]] of our vertical ones from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy, that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,' and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires, because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down as among the duties of medisance, and so pardon them, because they hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their incognito is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has; he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them; and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility, pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this historical drama—especially as he plays only the prompter—is the—Dog. Jean Paul."
I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this History to the learned world or not.
But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
... Spitzius Hofmann is the name of the dog; he was the rat, and was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him to-day—for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my writing—glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty, I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his repeating-watch,—the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the sheets,—the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all to him;—he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons, but charms,—like the apothecaries, who draw at once medicines and aqua vitæ,—so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes have, and vice versâ; and as this biography is set to music, because Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far more than Gessner's harmonious prose[[26]]), he can, when he has done reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as if I read the work;—the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of its illuminated circle of waves before my island,—I stand on the best footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;—everything is ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body blooms, my mind produces,—and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death may lay under my roots,—nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing joyfully—thou good destiny!—my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart, while contemplating these leaves, may forget, in short, gentle dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings—O, why is a man sometimes so happy?
For this reason: because he is sometimes a littérateur. As often as Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special map the little life-stream of a literatus, which runs over some lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus: "Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an inkhorn,—his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer) the Easter-fair,—his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a bookcase,—and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
[2. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Antediluvian History.—Victor's Plan of Life.
At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What is your name?—your character?—your business?"
The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius—i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name—had, in his younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which cost him but a single don gratuit from his subjects, and he succored and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a day, but seldom a night, without making others, and consequently being themselves, happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the Monsieur, or Mosye: these names were probably meant to allude to Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure, sensual and somewhat feeble, but—except where he feared—extremely philanthropic.
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion. What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court. Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers—from an excessive deference to political and domestic relations—throw an unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship, twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single, tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed—by the lord, whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual Old Man of the Mountain as he at once younger and more smooth.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit. Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something to his taste, for the reason that he had found what was still more so in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign, so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall happily get back again to our St. Luna.
A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper, held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again, he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself a conscientia dubia, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it, he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words, the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off only from the unmarried sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns, that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain wholly from the simple form.
It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now increased love for his four grand dukes or little dukes in Gaul stood to the fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London, because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently), after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian, the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more—to be found there.
Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante (his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's votum made him to the husbands of his court, and harmless to the fathers, nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining wall-crown (corona muralis) as with a joujou, and with its brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[[27]]
It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over presently, say I.
When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his adoption,—namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High Chamberlain was—and no one minded it less than Horion—an ardent friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him (as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for himself,—namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor, however sensitive to slight contusions,[[28]] easily gets over great ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le Baut by a threefold ligament,—by gratitude, son, and wife; his Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out plan, which she had hitherto regarded as an indulgent confidence. All the nobility and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and, pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his Lordship's.
Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr. Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice, which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms. January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent, because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once watchful and tame. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate, remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must be equal in order to resist their will; and any one who would play the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial syndic.
With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,—his letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[[29]]—and now, when he actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise the whole court that he should come back well.
Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise, ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account to add this much more:—
The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it. Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in fact he is only a country pastor.
From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher, accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift, which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her Flamin—in order to be at all events half a Briton—stay behind in the society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[[30]] should be transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish friendship. The same training hand—Dahore was the name of the teacher—reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story goes straight forward again.
His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to appear, and we all praise it. Not coldness, but cooling-off, is the greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a smoother form: for that very reason has Nature—just as they warm the mould for statuary metal—poured his soul into an ardent body.
He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind. His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular illusion of the sensitive retina.[[31]] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will be hurled down."
"No, I am to be hurled down first (to express myself in thy fashion),—but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage to interrupt other people like fools,—for my absence is just what they want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion. Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank, their mental structure, and their frequent separation.—
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess—"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without children, as Spitz says.)
"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him; and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside, what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's. "Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary, thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain—" Then, with full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them. The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the happy man labor for the unhappy."
He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure": whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know not how to stir or open anything—not excepting their hearts—but only their shell, to draw something in ..."
"I have not interrupted thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still for a moment.
"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah! around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand eyes?"
Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,—foolish,—that is, I mean—contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age. Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual as a serpent-stone[[32]] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah! but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man—dried up by the intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get well."
Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred his blood and shaken his heart.
And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
"I have a request for my Flamin."
"What is it?" said his Lordship.
"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier, take the pen."
The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a new question.
His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
[3. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Sowing-Day of Joys.—Watch-Tower.—Fraternization of the Heart!
The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's, rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life, turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an ox's stomach,[[33]] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for animals—consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are reconciled—and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the general uproar, and introduced themselves, and—which no ambassador would have done—waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him. Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one.... Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other things to talk about." But no quite other things came. Everybody wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[[34]] of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty? Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved faces,—those boyish years held a dark mirror in their hands, in which the glimmering perspective of his childish years ran backward; and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of Dahore, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he deserved it,—a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,—the Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner; but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any appetite,—which joy takes away more than grief,—except the three regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,—that is, into the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the reading-societies in a body to the immovable feast of the 4th of May, the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was, and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone, distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother. Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was, indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the company he kept,—namely, he went roving round with a young page, one Matthieu, son of the Minister Von Schleunes, a dissolute, universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer, who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow. Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me. Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite wrongly,—namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons (enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his comic salt, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A bon-mot is to them a dictum probans; a pasquin, a magister sententiarum; and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow these.
In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon. Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental excitements,—e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than a lamb.
Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence. Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden, whose memorabilia and curiosa are so edifying that the correferent[[35]] of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express, portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes; Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[[36]] Flamin's (F), with rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or Glycyrrhiza vulgaris (liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a vacant place and almanac royal among squashes and Stettin-apples, round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out, which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove away the answer.
Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood—one had only to leap the brook—a hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the people—not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the feeling of minorites—might up there look round them a little. One could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships. On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it melted away before it burned out.
Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St. Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of gravamina (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats. All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below by the organ-blower loci, who was valet-de-place of the village, and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The churl was deaf. He had in his mouchoir de Vénus—the handkerchief is, with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a reviewer—to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse, and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days; and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends. The case was this: Clotilda, Le Baut's only daughter by his first wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
"Do you take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very beautiful."
"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care not to take care."
"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong; but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages. "The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off again."
A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his love,—that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this point also.
"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and breast."
A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the peculiarities of their sex.
"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand Inquisitress.
"She—" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the fulness of glowing dreams. "She, of course—" he continued. "I pledge my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least, moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his poples or knee-joint grow lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very best of her sex,—for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[[37]] He absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,—that is, in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a male one; and, in case he were that,...
"I am a stupid drawing, an ambe, a double number, I say, and absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall still be on the look-out for the Quinterne.... And here let me ask, What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now, if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,—which, to be sure, without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,—I should not be indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses and pas, and both with their traditional pedes (or feet); I should bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether, which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the dishevelled[[38]] hair of a bearded comet....
"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one? What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight gratial and don gratuit, if thereby a creature was to be obtained who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted); who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain standing through the whole flying opera buffa and seria[[39]] of life,—so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least, when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and the landscape around—him melted away to a broad shadow, and he himself, too, that I might at least behold both shadowy hands," (one of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim—" (Checking himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in one of his!"
As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back with him,—not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead there,—with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor, however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all the seven consecrations, and praised her so much—perhaps also because she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side—that Victor could have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added, as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name (C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that panted to pour themselves out into each other.
Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being, and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt, down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ... Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again, there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity, around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these perishable integuments.
Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt never disturb me in my love to thee."
"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will gladly swear to thee again to-day."
"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and despair."
"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up hither when we can no longer be reconciled,—O, it pains me, too, Victor!—up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down and die!"
"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything happened, then?"
"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to thee all."
But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace; and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner and outer heavens.
At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her; that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned, galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation between them, so long as he took the juristic instead of the military road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken in his letters to Victor was just this,—that he would repeat all to his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities catches palpitations, was the chief reason.—Victor rejoiced that he could give his feelings the best language,—namely, action, and assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins—that ever-burning, intertwined name of friendship—glimmered in the west, beckoning upward out of an earthly eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their right....
There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,—because they know not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self (which latter cannot at once be the source and the object of love),—something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the virtue which in ourselves we only approve, and not till we see it in others can love.
Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as they are by north winds,—who would fain press to their bosoms the noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy earthly mask hangs,—and who fall, one after another, into graves into which the mourned draw their mourners?
[4. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Profile-Cutter.—Clotilda's Historic Figure.[[40]]—Courtiers, and a Noble Man.