Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: Making of America http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. [Greek: gelotophuê] represents the transliteration of the Greek text.
HESPERUS
OR
Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days
A BIOGRAPHY
FROM THE GERMAN OF
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS
"The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God,—the camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world,—the coast of God's creation,—a vaporous halo around a better sun,—the numerator to a still invisible denominator,—in fact, it is almost nothing at all."
Selections from the Papers of the Devil.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
Cambridge.
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
[25. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.—Julius.—Emanuel's Letter Concerning God.
[26. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Tergemini.—Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.—The Ascending Peruke.— Detection Of Knaveries.
[27. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Eye-Bandaging.—Picture behind the Bed-curtain.—Two Virtues in Danger.
[28. DOG-POST-DAY.]
First Easter-Holiday.—Arrival at the Parsonage.—Club of the Three Twins.—Carps.
Second Easter-Holiday.—Funeral-Discourse on Himself.—Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
Third Easter-Holiday.—F. Koch's Double Jews-harp.—The Sleigh-Ride.—The Ball And....
Preface to Part III.
Seventh Intercalary Day.—End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.— Unfeelingness of Readers.—Vol. III. (Preface to).
[29. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Conversion.—Billet-Doux of the Watch.—Crape Hat.
[30. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Letters.
[31. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Clotilda's Letter.—The Night-Express.—Rents and Gashes in the Band of Friendship.
[32. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.—Boiling-Point of Friendship.— Splendid Hopes for us.
[33. DOG-POST-DAY.]
First Whitsuntide-Day.—Police-Regulations of Pleasure.—Church.— The Evening.—The Blooming-Cavern.
[34. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Second Day of Whitsuntide.—Morning.—The Abbess.—The Water-Mirror.—Dumb Action for Libel.—The Rain and the Open Heaven.
[35. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Third Day of Whitsuntide, or Burgundy Chapter.—The Englishman.— Meadow-Ball.—Blissful Night.—The Blooming Cave.
[36. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Fourth and Last Day of Whitsuntide.—Hyacinth.—The Voice of Emanuel's Father.—Letter from the Angel.—Flute on the Grave.— Second Nightingale,—Farewell.—Pistols.—Ghostly Apparition.
Fourth Preface, or, Extorted Anticritique against one or another Review, with which I might possibly be displeased.
Ninth Intercalary Day.—Victor's Essay on the Relation of the Soul to the Organs.
[37. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Amoroso at Court.—Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.—Defence of Courtly Back-bending.
[38. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Sublime Hour before Midnight.—The Blissful After-Midnight.—The Soft Evening.
[39. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Great Disclosure.—New Separations.
[40. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Murderous Duel.—Apology for the Duel.—Prisons regarded as Temples.—Job's-Wails of the Parson.—Legends of my Biographical Past.—Potato-Planting.
[41. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Letter.—Two new Incisions of Fate.—His Lordship's Confession of Faith.
[42. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Self-Sacrifice.—Farewell Addresses to the Earth.—Memento Mori.— Walk.—Heart of Wax.
[43. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
[44. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Brotherly Love.—Friendly Love.—Maternal Love.—Love.
[45. OR LAST CHAPTER.]
Knef.—The Town of Hof.—Sorrel House.—Robbers.—Sleep.—Oath.— Night Journey.—Bushes.—End.
[APPENDIX.]
Additional Notes to "Titan".
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
[25. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.—Julius.—Emanuel's Letter concerning God.
Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as this thou wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love, Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades, by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?
—When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I begin it thus....
Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St. Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him exceedingly.
Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a window of the Ministerial Louvre. The conversation was lively enough; the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street. Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her, wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest, as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so little. Joachime was fond of only one child and one beauty,—and each was herself. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."
"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?" asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.
"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago, it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.
The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,—after his custom of being complimentary,—that, in order to save him the trouble of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.
I let circumstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly proceed.
It was as early as March, when the higher classes, on account of their sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,—any one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of others,—when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of recipes with the whole court,—when the eyes of the Princess, the embonpoint of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say, that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety imposes on her of intercourse with the noble Mat, with the Schleuneses and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[[1]] an innocent heart must, in moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical, when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks, and break.
Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior, Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;—towards the suffering, one is ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes, which deserved to open again only in a heaven.—While Victor stood in silent emotion before the still tranced one, and thought to himself: "If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have been, 'Now I am going to die,'—O God! would there be any other remedy for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound? And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!" As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided down from her lap;—here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his heart;—but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that player[[2]] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."
He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against this consuming enthusiasm,—so much does an unhappy love translate every female heart from the major tone into the minor, even that of a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin expressed almost more courage than beauty,—when quite other pastoral letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's happier friend Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his, when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year for reasons, of absenting himself from it another quarter of a year without reason,—this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I—have it myself. She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief, a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common pasture,—a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.
The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the trouble of—closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this insight into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by chance—or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,—he breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's, sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that is the beginning of my own name."
His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a sick-chamber at the Abbess's,—the very one Giulia had had,—that the fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable his great friend to stand upright.
Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way, "I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that—no, never. It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind—Julius in Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.
I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At the forefinger he said, "The French initial I looks like an S without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing; even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."
For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood: in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy veiled soul,—I go back into heaven."—
Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it, and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me sooner than a year hence."—
All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never unfold to the blind one her dying heart,—she was going just now to Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an angel,—finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;—in short, everything hits to a hair.
If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun, one has so often confounded clouds with sun-spots, he cannot blame her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.
Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet. One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from his Lordship. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it was as follows:—
"I come in autumn, when the apples ripen,—the Trinity [his Lordship means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the fourth, merry son] is wanting.—Flee from the Palace of the Empress of all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate the Minister Schleunes], but the grand duchess [Joachime] avoid still more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.—In Rome [he means Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think of the Island, ere thou makest a misstep."
Victor was astonished at first at the accidental appropriateness of these prohibitions; but when he bethought himself that he would have given them to him even on the Island, if they had not referred to his more recent circumstances, then he was still more astonished at the channels through which the espionage-despatches of his present relations might have reached his father,—(as if my correspondent and spy might not have been the father's also!)—and most of all at the warning against Joachime. "Oh! if she were false to me!" he said, sighing, and would not complete the dark picture nor the sigh.—But he drove both away by the little leaf from Emanuel, which read thus:—
"My Son:—
"The dawn of the new year shone on my face across the snow, as I placed before me the paper [Emanuel's second immediately following letter], upon which I sought to impress for the last time my soul with all its images reaching out beyond this globe. But the flames of my soul dart even to the body, and singe the frail thread of life; I was obliged often to turn away my too easily bleeding breast from the paper and from my rapture.
"I have, my son, written to thee with my blood.—Julius has now the thought of God.—The spring glows under the snow, and will soon lift itself up out of the green, and bloom even to the clouds.—My daughter [Clotilda] takes spring by the hand and comes to me,—let her take my son with the other hand, and lay him on my breast, wherein is a failing breath and an everlasting heart.... O how melodiously sound around me the evening bells of life!—Ay, when thou and thy Clotilda and our Julius, when we all, we who love each other, stand together, when I hear your voices, then shall I look to Heaven and say, The evening bells of life sound around me too mournfully; I shall for ecstasy die still earlier than the eve of the longest day, and ere my sainted father has appeared to me.
"Emanuel."
* * * * *
Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses, it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will only graze, not pluck, digests only lowly joys, and chills under the beam of a higher sun!—
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy, even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I cannot."—What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by his friend.—An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own, then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.—O, in order to make himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure immensity.—There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one, chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest, so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his grief;—this thought darted at him like a blaze;—and how at last, as the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,—none presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'—Oh! this heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one. Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to pieces....
Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard ones do others,—the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who have been healed?—O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned among the joys of fantasy,—a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are the least with which we buy a fair hour....
—Pride—the best counterpoise to effeminate tears—wiped away my hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.
"My Horion!
"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands of a new year are trickling down.—Uranus strikes for our little earth the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.
"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart, for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!
"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[[3]] I for the first time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity, He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my Horion!
"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when his angel had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest thought of man!'
"It was a sweet July evening, when my beloved one lay on my bosom, weeping, under the birch-tree on the mountain, and said: 'Tell me why I weep so very much this evening? Dost thou, then, never do it, Emanuel? But there fall also warm drops from the clouds on my cheeks.' I answered: 'There are little warm clouds that float round in heaven, and shake out a few dew-drops; but does not the angel walk up and down in thy soul? For thou stretchest out thy hand to touch him.' Julius said: 'Yes, he stands before my thoughts; but it was only thou that I wanted to touch: for the angel indeed is gone from the earth, and I long right earnestly for his voice. Dreamy shapes undulate into each other within me, but they have no such bright colors as in sleep,—gracious, smiling faces look upon me, and come up to me with outspread, shadowy arms, and beckon to my soul, and melt away, ere I can press them to my heart.[[4]] My Emanuel, is not thy face, then, one among my shadowy forms?' Here he pressed his wet face glowingly to mine, which seemed to hover before him in shadowy outline; a cloud sprinkled the consecrating water of heaven upon our embrace, and I said: 'We are softened so to-day only by that which encircles us, and which I now see.'—He answered: 'O, tell me what thou seest, and leave not off till the sun is gone down.'
"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved, the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender: heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father on a mother and her children,—the flowers and beating hearts fall into the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust, and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is loved, all meadows one intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible longing after love.'
"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.
"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing, while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt, fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth, thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,—the air hums,—the birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,—the storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark! they give the sign that our good sun is departed.
"'O Julius, Julius!' said I, and embraced his breast, 'the earth is great; but the heart which rests upon it is still greater than the earth, and greater than the sun.... For it alone thinks the greatest thought!'
"Suddenly there came forth a coolness from the deathbed of the sun, as from a grave. The high sea of the air undulated, and a broad stream, in whose bed woods lay prostrate, came roaring back through the heaven along the path by which the sun had departed. The altars of Nature, the mountains, were veiled in black as at a great mourning. Man was fastened down to the earth by the mist-cloud and separated from heaven. Transparent lightnings licked at the foot of the cloud, and the thunder smote three times at the black arch. But the storm upreared itself and rent it asunder; it drove the flying ruins of the shattered prison through the blue, and flung the dismembered masses of vapor down below the sky,—and for a long time it still continued to roar alone over the open earth, through the bright and cleansed plain.... But above it, behind the curtain which it had torn aside, glistened the all-holiest, the starry night.—
"Like a sun, the greatest thought of man rose in heaven,—my soul was borne down when I looked toward heaven, it was lifted up when I looked upon the earth.—
"For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars, but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.
"'O Julius,' said I, 'hast thou been good to-day?' He answered: 'I have done nothing but weep.'
"'Julius, kneel down and put away every evil thought,—hear my voice quiver, feel my hand tremble;—I kneel beside thee.
"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,—but thou hearest not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.—Step from the earth into the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,—moving mountains, after which hills[[5]] flutter, whirl along before thee, and go up and down before the sunshine,—then gaze about thee in the round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling arch.—Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.—Thou shuttest thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in the west,—and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream of time.—Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven; thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself alone and lookest round thee and—just as many suns and milky-ways flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale, still cloudlets.—
"'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human race,—Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of dust which consists of all our hearts?—
"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,—the sea of worlds without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth, the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is consumed;—O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and a world,—if time passes over the comets and treads them out like sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,—if the milky-ways dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great gloom,—if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into the abyss,—if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us little mortals made of dust?—Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us, thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou lovest us.—O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop, and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to Himself—yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'—
"Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit of Love, poor blind me also!—O, come into my soul, when it is alone, and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his thoughts and his beginning.'
"'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,—He has nothing, He is all, the whole heart conceives Him, but no thought; and we are only His thought, when He is ours.[[6]]—All that is infinite and incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil, and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'
"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace thee, and when I am dying!'—And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.
"Emanuel."
* * * * *
The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of dreams.—Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.[[7]]
[26. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Tergemini.—Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.—The Ascending Peruke.—Detection of Knaveries.
If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it. Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after tender, but not after exalting emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader, immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact, when one sees how they read a book,—namely, even five times as miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written—(I speak merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at once,—now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;—when one considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they read or marry,—and when one actually learns by sad observation, that, if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to it,—one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the white.
As the Vienna Magazine is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,—(since my bestial correspondent is likewise named Hofmann,[[8]])—that this same beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up with contraband goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;[[9]] but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon, which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I ask?—
We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them all.
Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.[[10]] The said foot—a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off, still retain the foot—was delighted when a gentleman of the court got a dinner out of him and—a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could, like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire, slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than reasonings about them.[[11]] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again this time the victim of practical jokes[[12]] and trouncings at Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the gout on the subject.
It was, namely, just before the first of April—many have three hundred and sixty-five first of April's every year—when the page made the apothecary an April fool.[[13]] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who announced themselves as tergemini, but were probably only brothers born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman, accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins, whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,—namely, the Satyr[[14]]—rode, could properly like the biting Evangelist and false Apostle of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam brighter in dephlogisticated gas.
When Matthieu saw the parsonage coachman and the hired lackey of the Englishmen, the bellows-blower Zeusel,—the twin-brother of the Apothecary,—he devised something which I will presently relate. The Apothecary was notoriously obliged to be ashamed of his veritable brother, because he was a mere bellows-blower, and raised no other wind than musical,—and because, furthermore, he had bad inner ears, and, as to outer ones, none at all. Nevertheless, as respects the latter he had protected himself with a judicial certificate which stated, to his credit, that he had lost his acoustic volutes in an honorable way by a surgeon who undertook to help his difficulty of hearing. But his head was his ear. If he held a staff in contact with the speaker or his seat, or if one preached directly over his head, he heard very well. Haller relates similar examples, e. g. of a deaf person who always thrust a long stick against the pulpit as conductor and bridge of devotion. His deafness, which called him rather to the post of a highest state servant than to that of a hired servant, was the very thing which secured him the victory over the competitors, because Cato the elder—so the jolly Englishman styled himself—was pleased with the fellow's droll posture.
The noble Matthieu, whose heart had full as dark a hue as his hair and eyes, hung the three twins as bait-worms on his line, to draw the Apothecary between his arm and Flamin's to St. Luna. Zeusel went gladly, never dreaming of the misfortune that awaited him, namely, his brother, with whom he had years ago agreed, for a certain consideration, that they would absolutely not know each other in company. Besides, the bellows-blower, in his simplicity, could not at all comprehend how such a distinguished man as Zeusel could be his brother, and adored him in silence afar off; only one thing he could not endure, despite his stupid patience, namely, that the Apothecary should pretend to be the first-born. "Am not I," said he, "a quarter of an ell longer, and a quarter of an hour older than he?" He swore it was forbidden in the Bible to sell one's birthright,—and then, like all in whom a stupid patience gives out, he was no longer controllable.
The Apothecary, after his first terror at the presence of his brother, saw with pleasure that no one knew his fraternity; he proposed, therefore, to imitate the rest, and demanded of his servant-brother, as coldly as any one, something to drink. The bellows-blower, as he bowed down his head that his brother overhead might give his commands, surveyed with astonishment and real reverence the silver trellised-gates and shackles on the feet of his kinsman, and his hip-pendant of steel garlands of watches. Zeusel would gladly—if the page could have been trusted—have made believe to the Britons that he was deceived, and took the bending-down of the deaf man for overdone cringing before courtiers; he would then have been able to add, that Opisthotonos towards inferiors is a cramp of the same kind with Emprosthotonos[[15]] towards superiors;—but, as was said, the Devil may trust court pages!
Meanwhile the Britons hardly noticed the fool with his money-purse on his posterior, and merely wondered what he wanted there. Their republican flames blazed up together with Flamin's, and in fact in such a manner that the page would have taken them for Frenchmen and for travelling agents and circular-messengers of the French Propaganda, had he not been of the opinion that only a fool could have anything to do with or believe in that. Matthieu had acuteness, but no principles,—truths, but no love of truth,—sharpness of perception without feeling,—wit without purpose. What he was after to-day was, by letting fly grazing shot, to fix the Apothecary in the agonizing fear that some connection of ideas or other would lead him every moment to the subject of his present brother. Thus he incidentally with great success laid the poor hare's-foot on the rack of the "larded hare," when he contended ironically—for nepotism.
"Popes and ministers," said he, "give important places, not to the first chance-comer, but to a man whom they have narrowly proved, because they have been almost brought up with him, namely, a friend by blood. They have too moral a way of thinking to let them, after their elevation, no longer know their kindred, nor do they hold the court to be a heaven where one never inquires about his fellow-trenchermen condemned to hell. Inasmuch as a minister can digest like an ostrich, one wonders that he does not also, like the ostrich, toss his eggs, full of relatives into the sand under the burning sun, and trust the hatching to accident. But nothing accords less with genuine nepotism than this; nay, the very ostrich, by night and in colder places, broods in person, and only omits it where the sun broods better; so, too, the man of influence provides for his cousins only in those cases where great want of merit requires it. I confess, morality can as little command nepotism as friendships; but the merit is so much the greater, when without any moral obligation one covers, as it were, with his family-tree, half the steps of the throne." This smelting-fume and vapor of satire prepossessed the Britons in his favor, especially as the fume implied noble metals, that is to say, the highest impartiality on the part of a son whose father was minister.
While the Apothecary carved the souper,—Mat had begged him to act as grand écuyer tranchant, his friend watched the moment when he had a great turkey-cock on the fork, to carve him in the air, as herons do fishes, and that, too, in Italian fashion; then the noble page took his way over the partitioned turkey-cock, and Poland, through the Electorates, till he arrived at the hereditary kingdoms, where he stopped to make the remark, that very naturally the first great Dictator will have raised up his own son to sit on his throne after him: "So had he often, at the Flachsenfingen shooting-matches, enjoyed seeing the children dance about with the crowns and sceptres which their fathers had shot down, and toss and play with them." The deaf man maintained by his gauging-rod and linstock, which he pressed against the table, the freest intimacy with the whole club, and watched his laboring brother, to see how he sawed and balanced. Matthieu, who loved the chief-carver, but the truth still more,[[16]] could not for his sake suppress his reflections upon crowned first-borns, but freely remarked, that "One should at least among the reigning family, if not among the people, have a free choice."
We do not now think even as the Jews do, with whom, to be sure, a half-bestial abortion has still the rights of primogeniture, but not, however, an entirely bestial one.[[17]]—The bellows-blower was impregnated through the fallopian tube[[18]] of the staff with new ideas of primogeniture,—his brother was more dismembered with agony than the turkey-cock in the air. The Evangelist went on: "With the Jews, too, the bestial first-born, because it can never offer a sacrifice, has the best food, and is holy and inviolable,—the rest of the cattle belong to the class of younger sons." ...
—Thereupon he suddenly and smilingly pronounced the compliment: "Only my friend here with the turkey-cock makes the happiest exception to my assertion, and his respected brother with the staff there the wretchedest; they are, however, twins, and he is only a quarter of an hour older than the deaf one." He turned composedly to him of the staff, who had already mobilized[[19]] his face for war, "Am I not right, a quarter of an hour older?"
"Yes, may God punish me," said he, "if I am not. What says my brother?"
The Apothecary, fainting, had to let fall the dividend on the fork, though it had already been lightened by the cutting off of successive quotients. The bellows-blower took a flying survey of all faces, and detected on all a silent scepticism, which the page by his cold assurances made still more legible. "There is nothing in the whole joke," said Zeusel in a low tone, "that can possibly interest any one."
As the bellows-blower could not get hold, through his long auricular organ, of the low murmured exception,—but he did not see how even then he was going to maintain his case and his right of primogeniture,—he entered upon his proof, and fetched out four long curses, as answering to just so many syllogistic figures, and bent his head before his brother, that he might hand in over it his replication. The Apothecary, who wanted to invalidate, not the primogeniture, but only the claim to be his brother, and who, on account of doubt as to his title, did not care to address him, said imploringly to Matthieu, "Concede the point to him, for he does not know at all what we have hitherto been talking of."
Quickly and abruptly, then, but with an incredulous look, the page said to him, "You shall be right, my friend," and added, under pretence of wishing to divert him, "You look right fresh and young."
"By heaven!" replied he, flaming up, "he there is younger; but he came behind me, as a fellow-traveller, into the world in the form of a tobacco-pouch: he is woven and twisted together out of the little beggar-men[[20]] that fell off from me."
The bellows-blower now fired off all the cannons on the wall of his head, exasperated by the vinegar-glances and poisonous looks and inaudibleness of his blood-friend: he therefore stretched out his thumb and his little finger, and set them like the feet of a pair of compasses on his own face by way of measuring it; then he set out to apply the two as a long-measure to the face of his blood-friend: he would then, as man is ten faces long, have held his own and the other face opposite each other, and then from their difference in measurement have easily inferred their respective statures; but the Apothecary wabbled, and the bellows-blower quite incorrectly planted his thumb above the jawbone. Here the thumb, which sought to press itself into the soft cheek, was stopped by something hard and round, and the servant of the bellows, by the slipping down of the thumb upon the jaw, propelled out of the mouth a ball of wax with which the Apothecary had stuffed out as with a padding his sunken cheeks, in order to swell up the inlaid sculpture of his visage into relievo. The emerging ball knocked over, like a nine-pin ball, the Apothecary, i. e. upset his equanimity, and with flashing eyes he said to the deaf one, who was now on the point of absolutely striding on to a history of his bald head, only this much: "You, man, have no bringing up, and your elder brother must plane you down first."
But as the Calcant[[21]] had already made some headway in the natural history of the baldhead, Zeusel hurried off with the excuse that the Court-Physician Horion was awaiting him this evening. The most serious of the Englishmen stepped up very near to him and said: "Commend me to the Doctor, and as he makes such good cures, tell him, in my name, you are a great fool."
Hardly had he got out of the village, when the Calcant took pity on the Emigrant, and would fain have done with his history of the bald head. The Evangelist, therefore, despatched him after the enraged twin, to catch him now in the dark; and took up himself in his place the historic thread. On an evening—so the story ran—when the court was not at the play, the Court Apothecary—Heaven knows how—poked out his nut-cracker-face from one of the first boxes. Matthieu, who was then still page, posted the bellows-blower in the zenith of his peruke, namely, in the gallery exactly above him. The Calcant let down from above by an invisible horsehair a little hook, which hung like a bird of prey over the out-looking peruke, which I hold to be an ideal of hair. For it seemed to have grown out from the head (from which locks and vergette[[22]] had long since fallen off) as an indigene and shoot, and no one took it for an adopted for. The bellows-blower let the hook swing and sway like a pendulum above the peruke, till such time as there was a certainty of its having fastened into the vergette. Forthwith he made use of his hands as a drayman's windlass, and lifted up (as the frost does other growths) the whole frisure by the roots, and slowly drew the pig-tail wig like an ascending hair-balloon up into the air. The pit and the chief-lover and the lamplighter were turned by astonishment into lumps of ice, as they saw the tailed comet go up in right ascension to the gallery. Upon the Apothecary, who felt his head uncovered and blown upon by a cold wind, the few natural hairs lifted themselves up with terror, like the artificial ones, and when he turned round with his bald skull to look after the lifting of his head of hair on the cross, his twin-brother (in order not to be discovered) let the whole hairy meteor, which wanted to go after the hair of Berenice[[23]] in heaven, actually fall down before his face among the people, and looked composedly down at its culmination in the nadir, like the rest of the gallery.
During our recital the twins have been pommelling each other. The aspirant for primogeniture called out there, on the Flachsenfingen road, which was covered with the darkness of night, in one continued yell, "Mr. Court Apothecary!" and as he could not, of course, hear any answer, he was obliged to knock his ear-trumpet against every object, to hear whether it said anything. At last his probing-rod came in contact with the firstborn, and he marched up to him to beg his forgiveness and return. But the Apothecary was in such a boiling and overflowing state, that, when the bellows-blower ducked his head to take in his answer, he made up his hand into a ball and let it fall like a bell-hammer on the sagittal suture of the bended head, whereupon the diving-bell gave out a regular tone. The Apothecary, if one had rightly understood him and given him time, would by this trip-hammer have made the sutures on the deaf-head considerably more prominent; but in this he was disturbed by his own brother, who bent his head down like a bush,—for the bellows-blower would have inserted his fingers like ornamental pins into the artificial hair and dragged him by that, if the peruke had been made fast on his head,—so that he could lay his hearing-tube as a second backbone so stoutly and yet so carefully along the twin's first, that no one came off with compound fractures, except the hearing-tube.—Thereupon he said good night, and recommended him to keep to the left, in order not to lose his way....
—Had I known that this history would overshadow so many leaves, I would sooner have thrown it away.—The next morning the impudent Matthieu paid a visit to the cross-bearer, on whose hands the chiragra, warmed into maturity by wrath, was burning; he was going now—for he answered every reproach against his shamelessness with a greater—to make the gouty hands cat's-paws again to take fresh chestnuts of fun out of the fire. But the Apothecary, whose heart was only small, but not black, felt himself too sorely injured, and when Matthieu, laughing at his complaints, departed from him in silence, without even giving himself the trouble of an excuse, then the chiragrist swore—and there we have the fool again—to upset him.
Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living; it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to St. Luna.—Flamin disclosed to our Victor the joke upon the sick Zeusel. It displeased him altogether, just as writings like the Anti-hypochondriac, the Vade-Mecum,[[24]] or the oral retailers of printed jokes,—the stalest of all companions,—disgusted him. He could never set on a bearbaiting between two fools: only the sketch of such a battle-piece tickled his humor, but not the execution, just as he loved to read and imagine cudgelling-scenes in Smollett (the master in that line), but never cared to see them. Even of the incarnate bon-mots and hand-pointings at another's body he thought too disparagingly, which I, indeed, should be disposed to call dumb wit (just as there are dumb sins), and which are the true attic salt of small towns; for true wit, methinks, must, like Christianity, show itself, not in words, but in works. He looked upon our follies with a forgiving eye, with humoristic fantasies, and with the ever-recurring thought of the universal lunacy of man, and with melancholy conclusions. When he had once deducted the bad point, that Zeusel came bending before every nobleman as his hired beast, till the latter cudgelled him back, as in Paris one can hire lapdogs to go to walk with,—then the vanity of the man, especially as, in other cases, it was good-natured, indulgent, and often even witty, was something he had little to object to. No one tolerated vanity and pride more affectionately than he. "What does a man get by it, then," said he, much too spiritedly, "unless he is a fool, or where then shall he leave off being lowly? We must either think too well of ourselves, or not at all."
Victor, therefore, with his sympathetic soul, paid at once a friendly and a professional visit to his landlord. This mood of his fell in grandly with the Apothecary's plan of securing the Doctor's influence against Mat.
"For this I need nothing," said Zeusel to Zeusel, "except to let him see the intrigues which the Schleunes family is playing against him; for without me he is not raffiné enough for that."
For, in fact, he holds the hero of the Dog-Post-Days—who very willingly lets him—to be a little too stupid, merely because the latter was good-natured, humoristic, and confidential towards all men. In fact, life in the great world gave him, it is true, mental and bodily flexibility and freedom, at least greater than he would otherwise have had; but a certain external dignity, which he perceived in his father, in the Minister, and often even in Matthieu, he could never properly or long imitate; he was content to have a higher dignity within, and felt it almost ludicrous to be serious on the earth, and too small a thing to look proud. Perhaps it was for this very reason that Victor and Schleunes could not like each other; a man of talents and a citizen of talents hate each other reciprocally.
Before I allow the Apothecary to point out all the threads of the Schleunes spider-web, I will merely explain why Zeusel was so all-knowing on this subject, and yet Victor so blind. The latter was so, because in the midst of his enjoyments he never set himself at all to the guessing out of indifferent or bad people; in fact, like a bird of paradise, he floated always in the air of heaven, far removed from the dirty ground, and, as all birds of paradise do on account of the looseness of their plumage, always flew against the wind; hence, from a want of communication, he did not get oral court news till all the Heyducs,[[25]] lackeys of pages, and stove-heaters had already read them black,—often did not get them at all.—The Apothecary is in the opposite case, because he has the bad eyes, it is true, but then the good ears of a mole, and because in the camera-obscura of his congenial heart the forms of kindred tricks more readily image themselves; add to this, that he applies two long ear-trumpets—two daughters—to cabinets, or rather to their lovers, when they come out therefrom, and overhears by the tubes many a thing, of which I can avail myself grandly in the Third Part of this biography. There are men—he was one—who will hunt up intelligence without the least interest in its contents, and personalia without realia, and who, with no curiosity about learning, seek to become acquainted with all learned men,—without any care for politics, to know all great statesmen,—and without the least love for war, to know all generals,—personally and by letter.
It may be that many a reader of fine sense has already, from the foregoing, got wind of that which Zeusel will now disclose. I give the Apothecary's exposé in the following abridgment:—
"The Minister had never been able formerly to draw the Prince into his interest, seldom to get him to his house; to be sure, he had sometimes not omitted to give in marriage a daughter who might please him; but either the diverse interest of the daughter's husband was always unpropitious to his own, or else the influence of his Lordship was. Hence he was more to be excused than condemned for espousing the cause of the weaker party, namely, that of the Princess, who at least, in all events, was something, and who perhaps was only concealing still her Italian arts. On the whole, then, it was not unjust, that one should endeavor through Matthieu to attach the Princess, who has much frailty, to the house of Schleunes, wherein they constrained themselves to walk after her external grandioseness of virtue, while they could make up to her by the court page for the coldness of her spouse." ...
If the reader imagines to himself the worst, he will comprehend Victor's incredulous staring and cursing; but he will let Zeusel have his say out first.
"Fortunately the Court-Physician had done the family the honor of often visiting them; and the Schleuneses probably had encouraged him in every way to a more frequent bestowal of his visits, especially as he thereby made the Prince also a familiar guest. Deponent had a variety of information on this subject from good authority." ...
Victor guessed, what Zeusel from politeness concealed, the allusion to Joachime. "Singular,—is it not?" thought he, "that my father writes me almost the same thing! But here is a fine complication of purposes! I make the Minister my cloak of concealment in my designs upon the Princess, and he makes me his in his designs upon the Prince." That is what he ought to have known without me, that bad men never seek good ones out of love, and that Joachime's heart is nothing but a bait in the hands of the Minister; but poetic men, who keep the wings of fancy forever on the stretch, are caught, like larks, by means of their outspread wings, even in nets which have the widest meshes, through which the smooth body of a bird might easily slip. Only one word more: why did Victor demean himself toward the best persons—towards Clotilda, his father, &c.—more finely, handsomely, and properly than the best man of the world; and yet towards mediocre and bad people conduct himself so clumsily; why?—Because he did everything from inclination and regard, and nothing from selfishness and imitation; worldlings, on the contrary, maintain always a uniform demeanor, because they never shape it after other people's merits, but according to their own designs. Hence his father, on the island, among those rules of life which, taken together, were a fine covert prophecy of his faults and fortunes, gave him this one: One commits the most follies among people whom one does not respect.
"Now, as Clotilda pleased the Prince, this Matthieu, who had been a suitor for her some years before, would seek to make her one of his conquests, in order, through her, to achieve much more important ones."
Fie! cried Victor's whole soul, now I see for the first time all the prickles of the crown of thorns which they are pressing upon thy heart, thou poor Clotilda!
"Matthieu would long since have got farther on with his propositions of marriage had he had his present prospects (of—an adulterous act) nearer before him. Perhaps, too, Matthieu was further anxious about the return of her brother (Flamin, on account of her diminished inheritance), although the death of his sister (the source of the inheritance, Giulia) slightly indemnified him. Hence the Princess loved Clotilda, since the marriage of the latter with Matthieu was only a matter of interest. But if it really came to an espousal, as was probable, since Matthieu, if only by coarseness, would extort it from the Chamberlain," ... (it is a peculiar trait of the Evangelist, that towards the weak he was coarse, and often towards the same person rude and then again refined,) ... "then might Matthieu and January exercise themselves in mutual forgiveness; and the band of friendship would bind at once four persons in different knots. This fourfold concatenation no one would then any longer be able to dissolve, and all would go to the Devil. The only Deus ex machinâ who could still prevent the tying of this knot was the Court-Physician. To him, perhaps, Herr Le Baut would not refuse his daughter, as he had helped her get the place of maid of honor, 'which, at that time, when I was not at liberty distinctly to explain myself to you, was precisely my true intention, which you guessed quite as well as you executed,'—and as the fate of the son (Flamin, who, according to the general opinion, was not yet visible and acknowledged) really lay in the hands of his Lordship. Nor did he doubt about gaining the Princess, as he (the Doctor) had hitherto possessed her favor, and she preferred him to Dr. Culpepper. The loss of Clotilda and Agnola would clip the Schleuneses' wings." ...
Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action, deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,—though with more heat than one will now expect,—"O thou good Princess, the German scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never heal!—Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and defend his friends too ardently,—and, in fact, from his very inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his own honor, he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would, indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth.
The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff inexpressibly disgusts me.—O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!—"
He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,—and Clotilda came with her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"—and Joachime danced by and said, "I laugh at you, mon cher!" and the Princess veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!"
The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a neighborhood,—as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces, took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the watch.
[27. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Eye-Bandaging.—Picture behind the Bed-curtain.—Two Virtues in Danger.
In Passion-week Clotilda, released by the Princess amidst caresses, went to St. Luna. In Easter-week she is to carry her heart, full of concealed cares, to Maienthal, to more congenial souls, when she has first passed through a purgatory, namely, through a brilliant ball which the Prince gives her—or, to speak more politely, to the Princess—on the third Easter-holiday.... If this flower shall be dug out and transplanted by the melon-lever of death from my biographical beds,—I throw away my pen and cudgel back Spitz,—I have come to be as much accustomed to her as to a betrothed,—where shall I again discover at court a female character which, like hers, unites holy and fine manners, Heaven and this world, virtue and ton,—a heart which (if it is allowable to compare it with anything small) resembles the heart-shaped montre à régulateur so tormenting to our hero, that with the index-hand of the court hours combines an index-hand of the sun's hours and the magnet of love?
Now, we are still together through all the Easter-holidays; for Sebastian must go to Pastor Eymann's, to see him and the three British twins, and his dear Chaplainess, and so much else that was dear. He would gladly have followed the Regency-Councillor thither on holy Easter-eve, (and it would have been as delightful to the biographer as an Easter-pancake, for he is more than sated with cities and courts on paper,) but the genius of the tenderest friendship beckoned to him for the sake of Flamin and Clotilda, who had both so long wanted and so longingly wished each other, and were now reciprocally bringing with them to the meeting new wounds, to stay behind at least only till the first Easter-day, as if he would ask, "Surely, the first glad looks of brother and sister so long held asunder, my unhappy Sebastian will not wish to disturb?"—"No, surely!" answered his tear.
The city was now emptied of his loved ones.—Passion-week was truly one to him, not even the Princess, as it were the electrophorus of his love-flame blown back upon his own heart, had for a long time been visible to him,—for in this mood he could not go to Joachime's—when the father-confessor of the Princess, who to-day had confessed to him (on holy Easter-eve), called upon him and unfolded before him a medical bulletin of the state of her eyes, and scolded at him in a friendly manner, that the Court-Confessor, instead of bringing remission of sins to the Court-Physician, had to bring the sins themselves before his conscience. "I was on the point of making a journey to-morrow," said Victor.—"Very well!" said the Pater, "the Princess desires your help this very day."
On the way he said to himself: "Has, then, Tostato forsworn his Easter confession, that now at evening he still has not arrived? and where the devil will he be to-morrow?"—Here! answered—Tostato behind him.—Such a jolly penitent no sacristy had ever yet seen. The child of fun and deviltry and penance told the reason of his wild delight: "The Princess had to-day, as his countrywoman, bought out half his shop." Before Victor had arrayed on his face in rank and file those serious looks, with which he was going to entreat of him silence on the subject of his mercantile vicariate,—I mean, his shop-keeping,—the skipping penitent gladdened him with the news, that the Princess had inquired after his and her countrymen, his associés, and that he had not at all concealed from her, that somebody had once been of the latter without being of the former, namely, her Court-Physician himself.—"Thunder!" said the ...
The poor fool of a merchant meant it well, and there was nothing further to be done about it than to investigate, whether Agnola's questioning had not been mere accident; whether she still had the watch, or had ever opened it; whether no wind had blown away the declaration of love as a sister-wind!
After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative, stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.
When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an indictment against the encased Billet-doux; but not so much as an initial letter or the rubrum of a sentence was seen upon her face, as he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in bed,—not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,—the moss-bank,—the high-altar,—the royal palace,—in short, the princely chair and seat. Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed, nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics, except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless, that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or—a German lady,—or both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet conspired to shed an undulating blue clare-obscure. A single wax taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons, that is, in sculpture,—upon which custom of the great not to enjoy nature except in counters, in effigie and copy-paper, never in naturâ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons, because it would require a whole
EXTRA-LEAF
in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere—on tapestry, on the dessus des portes, des trumeaux,[[26] ]des cheminées, on vases, on candle-sticks, on plats de menage,[[27]] on snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle—love to see a landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and concede to old Nature this jus imaginum, the true one could be picked out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,—or from the fact that the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what they hate,—or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated images of the same,—or that from a finer feeling they fancy less the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller puzzle-pictures of the artists,—or that they would resemble people (if there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts—and yet, if the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would, from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the
End of the Extra-Leaf.
The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[[28]] at Besançon; for at the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six livres.—The hated covering was the gloves, against which he universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.—There, at most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus de' Medici, even to the very hands?[[29]] I pause for a reply!"
In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything—except Agnola's beautiful Roman shoulders—is covered up; even two images of saints were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown—it was not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine crowns—was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very fine St. Sebastian by Titian—copied from the Barbarigo palace in Venice—(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung close by her pillow)—she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.
Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in here six final S's in succession) than one which is just in the act of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of such a lovely glow—when he was about to proceed as oculist—that he at once proceeded as Protomedicus[[30]] of her head, in order to take her hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand the glove-callus—they were, however, only half-gloves with bare fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. hemiptera,—then was the Doctor, because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged there,—all of us in a body,—but they must bury them in a stocking, which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book—e. g. the Dog-Post-Days—as in a lantern.
—It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely chamber, one tail—I mean one digression à la Sterne—has followed another.—
The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight, he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be made of the apple of beauty—and the black ribbon of beauty-patches pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and Madonna-face,—and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,—to keep himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a true postillon d'amour, so beautifully divides and sets off,—a bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on the pillow and on the hand....
I ought to have attempted a climax, have begun with Sebastian's soul, which to-day out of its own melancholy, out of its sorrows, out of its love for Agnola magnified by Zeusel's calumny, made nothing but lines of beauty and flowing tints in order to paint into his own face as beautiful a new one as ever a fair soul created on canvas, or on its own head or on another's.
Agnola may well have had this perception sooner than I.
It furnished, of course, to the couple slender assistance that they were (not under four eyes—for Agnola's were darkened—but) under only two eyes; for the two other eyes, of the Court-dame in the cabinet, about which Victor could not be sure, till now when the princely ones were shut, and he could without questions investigate by glances and smiles the stiff thing on the chair in there in the cabinet, were really painted, and so was the body which bore them.
It struck him as singular now, that, against all Court-order, he was suffered to be alone with the Princess; but, he said to himself, she is an Italian,—a patient,—a lovely little child of fancy—(this last was perceptible even in the unusual winter negligé and Sicilian fire). He could not possibly, therefore, (even to-day before the bandaging of the eyes,) hit the right tone with her; for as she was too fine for a German,—not tender enough for an Englishwoman,—too lively for a Spaniard, he would certainly have written on her p. p. p. (passé par Paris, which is inscribed on letters that come via Paris), he would have done it, I say, had she not again been too impassioned for a Parisienne. There was the rub.—But as two persons converse more courageously and freely when one or both sit in the dark—and that was Agnola's case:—Victor was, after all, to-day not absolutely as simple as a sheep. Add to this that he took heart from the jewel-cupboard, in which to his joy—she could not see him look round so impolitely—he discovered among twenty watches no montre à régulateur. She asked him whether she should be so far restored by the third holiday, that she might contribute something to the Prince's pleasure at the ball. He answered affirmatively, though he knew that she would contribute still more to it by staying away, and although she knew it, too. Here he began to pity her, and he would fain make a clean heart. He would not exactly say plumply: "In Gross-Kussewitz I let the Devil so abuse my good nature as to prevail on me to smuggle into your Highness's watch a declaration of love"; but he would, in the finest outpouring of soul, fall down with his beating bosom and say: "Not from fear of punishment, but from fear lest the confession of my fault may contract some similarity to a repetition of the offence, I have hitherto concealed the fact that I once expressed, not so much too strongly as too boldly, a profoundness of esteem in which I am permitted to imitate only your Court, and not its sovereign; but the strength of feelings is easily confounded with their lawfulness."
He still delayed this falling down, because he perceived behind the curtain a gold strip which seemed to be the beginning of a picture-frame. This border-work must surely run round something,—round a picture, I fancy: and this was what he would like to know.
The cursed Court-Apothecary with his calumny had it to answer for, that he had this wish; not as if he supposed that Mat's face hung in a gilded frame behind the bed, but because to-day all sorts of things had startled him. He could do it very easily, as the arras-door and nunnery-grating of her eye was hung with black; he needed only to support his left hand softly on the edge of the bed, and thus, bending forward and hovering over her with suspended breath, reach across with his right over the bed (it was narrow, and he tall) and pull the curtain a little,—and then he would know what hung behind there. I repeat, but for the Apothecary it would never have entered his head. A slanderer causes one to demand of every action at least its passport,—one does it merely to effect a most patent refutation of the slanderer,—and as, often, the most innocent act has no certificate of health, one shakes one's head and says, It is a real calumny, but then I will still be on the watch.
He had made several attempts to reach over, but as she always had something to say and he to answer, it would not do, unless he chose to betray his nearness to her ears. The conversation related to the ball,—the presence and illness of her maid of honor, Clotilda,—the substitute of the latter, Joachime, upon whose appointment Victor expressed himself with decided coldness; he could never, with Agnola, get beyond court-news; all that was abstract and metaphysical she seemed to hate or to ignore; and as to talking of emotions with her,—which he generally loved best to do with women, and for which the husband's would have given him ample occasion and material,—that seemed to him not much better than actually to have them.
When he had given his cold answer about the promotion of Joachime,—a coldness which formed a flattering contrast to his present enthusiastic warmth and fulness of feeling for the Princess,—he would fain insert in the half-bar-rest which followed, and which Agnola filled out with thinking, the raising of the curtain. He rested on his hand, held his breath, drew the curtain,—but the St. Sebastian was behind it, which I have already mentioned above, and which was most certainly by Titian, and not by Vandyk, because he looked so like our Victor,[[31]] that it was credible to him that the Pater had copied it from his wax-statue at St. Luna. The Saint appeared to him still worse than the Evangelist,—not because he thought the portrait was his namesake, but because it occurred to him why the women in Italy sometimes veil the pictures of saints. Tho reason can, notoriously, form the subject of a wood-cut for the ten commandments—(Göschen and Unger ought to edit the catechism with more tasteful cuts to the prohibitions than the old ones are). Even the Mary over the bed was veiled with plumes and everything.... Zeusel! Zeusel! hadst thou not calumniated, this whole biography (so far as I can foresee) might well have had a different course!
He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning orbit.—For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding apple-fruit.... Dear æsthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's globe de compression,[[32]]—over this waxing moon-globe, whereof one never sees the other half,—near this commanding eminence, which, like other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,—and that too at a court where generally the dress-regulations suppress everything elevated?
When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,—but now it must first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire.
He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings. Besides, a new circumstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm. A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superincumbent snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled goddess moved mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything, out of this enchanted heaven.
Too late!—The ribbon is down from her eyes,—perhaps his sigh had been too near, or his silence too long.
And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he hung in the petrified posture,—her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly overflowed with the milder light of love,—ardently and softly she said, Comment? And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing, dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a bloody chemise-pin.
Like a doomsday in the night-clouds the watchman's homely admonition to think of death and of the twelfth spirit-hour of this midnight of life, pealed into his ears, before which the blood-streams of the heart rushed by. The call in the street seemed to come from Emanuel, and to say: "Horion! Stain not thy soul, and fall not away from thy Emanuel and from thyself! Look at the linen over her diseased eye, as if death veiled it, and sink not!"
"I sink not!" said his whole heart; he unwound himself with respectful forbearance out of the throbbing arms, and stiffening at the possibility of an imitation of the wretched Matthieu, whom he had so despised, he sank down outside of the bed on her hand, which he had drawn out with him, and said with streaming tears: "Forgive a youth,—forgive his overmastered heart,—his dazzled eyes,—I deserve all punishments, any one would be to me a pardon,—but I have forgotten no one except myself."—"Mais c'est moi, que j'oublie en vous pardonnant,"[[33]] said she with an ambiguous look, and he rose, and as her answer gave him the choice between the most agreeable and the most humbling interpretation, he gladly punished himself with the latter. Agnola's eye flashed with love,—then with anger,—then with love,—then it closed;—he stepped back to the most respectful distance,—she opened it again and turned her face coldly to the wall; and by a secret pressure against the wall which, I suppose, commanded a private bell in the apartment of the Chambermaid, gave the latter the order to make haste,—and in a few minutes she came in with the eye-band. Naturally (as in human life) they played out the fifth act, just as if there had been no third and fourth.—Then he politely withdrew.
There!—Now the reader and I begin to quarrel about the matter, and Victor to think about it. His embrace was not right,—nor were his voyage of discovery to the wall and his picture-exhibition,—but it was discreet; for he could not, of course, really throw a backward somerset, and say, "I thought Mat was hanging behind the bed."—To this, to be sure, people of experience reply, "We do not quarrel with him here for preferring discretion to virtue, but rather for this, that he did not do so again after the kiss. That kiss is too small a fault for Agnola to be able to forgive." I observe, these people of experience are adherents of the sect who, in my book, reckon the Princess, on account of so many half-proofs, among those women who, too proud and hard for the love of the heart, only let the love of the senses alternate flyingly with the love of domination, and who do it only for the sake of making out of Cupid's bandage a rein, and out of his arrows spurs and stirrups. I am very well acquainted, too, with the half-proofs with which this sect backs itself,—the bigotry of the Princess,—her confession-eve,—her previous attentions to my hero,—the covering of the painted Mary, and the exposure of the more living one,—and all the circumstances of my narration. But I cannot possibly believe such a thing of a friend of Clotilda (unless the latter, for this very reason, had taken leave of her, or from goodness of soul had not at all comprehended those couriers of the temperament more common with the male sex), until in the sequel manifest traces of a more exasperated than afflicted woman compel me to it.
I am getting quite away from my promise, to present some considerations, which would certainly, with impartial persons, if not justify, yet excuse my hero, for becoming, after the kiss, virtuous again, so to speak, and not full of the live Devil. I boldly set down among the grounds of mitigation his want of acquaintance with those women who, like the Spartans, bravely ask not about the number of the foes of their virtue, but about their position; he was often with them, indeed, and in their camp, but his virtue hindered them from showing him theirs. He is less excused by the influence of the night-watchman, and the remembrance of death; for this needs itself to be excused;—but then, on the other hand, it is only too certain, that certain men of a philosophical or even a poetic organization, precisely then, and in fact always, regard, instead of their own position, general ideas, when others can understand nothing at all, and be nothing at all but self: namely, in the greatest dangers, in the greatest sufferings, in the greatest joys.
A fair man will throw all upon the Apothecary, who was Victor's moral and mechanical bed-cord, or helper out-of-bed; for as he had prefigured to him the noble Mat in a similar situation (but without the bed-cord), of course the abhorrence which Victor, some days before, had felt of the Evangelist's conduct, became in him a laming incapacity of copying it in the least a few days after.—O if we could only, a couple of days beforehand, see every sin, to which we are tempted by ourselves or others, actually committed by a true scamp, whom we spit upon! Could we then eagerly imitate the scamp?
Finally, one needs only to cast a glance at Victor in his balcony, where he now sits in a singular barometrical condition, if one would pass judgment on his previous state. His present state, namely, is a mixture of emptiness, discontent (with himself and everybody), of increased love for Agnola, justification of this Agnola, and yet the impossibility of imagining her a near friend, of Clotilda's.
For myself, I shall never repent the little which I have hastily brought together, if I have shown up therein by a few happy hints how well my hero, in regard to his conduct after the kiss, which must strike strict people of the world as singular, can plead a disagreeable combination of constraining circumstances, and if I shall, therefore, have succeeded in restoring to him, at the end of the twenty-seventh chapter, the respect which he had forfeited, by not wrapping round the princely ring; too large for his finger, the long silken threads of love, so as to make it fit....
[28. DOG-POST-DAY.]
EASTER-FESTIVAL.
A dog-day so long and weighty as the twenty-eighth one may be allowed to break up into three holidays.
FIRST EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Arrival at the Parsonage.—Club of the Three Twins.—Carps.
On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,—I mean the residence-city,—but not till towards evening, in order not, to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so joyously over these houses,—I described it long ago,—and he compared his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou hast and what thou meanest,—namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart in the whole city,—but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna, and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the second leave of the pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...
Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no addition to his æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him, because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and come up with him,—the more fiercely the master dashed forward through space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward did the scholar take to overtake him,—that was the whole scrape, but so do men chase men.
Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,—this delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....
O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly, and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt: I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to my work with true critics,—but with postmasters, too, who, when I despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And am I not encouraged to the opposite course—that of protracting my emotions—by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon, inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope, to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?
The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,—he and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of her parents;—but here in the country, where there are fewer moral weeds than in cities (just as there are fewer botanical in fields than in gardens), and where one enjoys pleasures without maîtres de déplaisirs,—here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing for all other love,—no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be. Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English ones had upright heads and the Belgian hanging ones.
All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended them,—or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,—or what the reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[[34]] which were the names of the three holy kings from the East.
The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious, condensed style,—he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself, that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds of motive in the will, still man chooses as well his system as his conduct.
Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this: Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to) that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too, that the poets could sing for Liberty, indeed, but not speak for it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I know men are now neither barbaric nor cultivated enough to enjoy the Poets and follow them; Poets, Religion, Passions, and Women are four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the middle age,—that of despising them; the past age was that of deifying them; the future will be that of honoring them." The indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something higher than property or life;—when he further said, every man of culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government, notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in democracies enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;—and when he made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for the English people, armor-bearer and Contradictor, because the principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution; because all acts of injustice were committed according to the show of law, which was better than a justice against the show of law; and because the nunnery-grating which had now been built around the freedom of the English press[[35]] was no worse than the Athenian prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,—
The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....
Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said: "If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and every hearer would still cry, Hear him!" Victor said, with the modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from these principles that he resembled them;—perhaps at the next club!" "And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a few weeks."—If we live to see it,—I and the reader,—it is to be hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the company.
My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages; but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with passionate embrace forever to their souls.
After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,—this time it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero qui jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynée ou perdue,[[36]]—or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he. Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound carp,—a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the adopted son Bastian,—not so much whether it was properly scaled (he passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[[37]] is after all of small consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.—His own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake, more considerately, Appel! Embitter not my first Easter-day," said he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.
However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four pounds—so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted—weighs more in the fish-scales of contentment, than the golden fish-bones in the red field of the arms of Count Windischgrätz!
Could he then stay long in the kitchen,—that widow's seat of his old departed youth,—among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,—although he had to-day in the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[[38]] at least as a bandage over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose before so many thick-skinned souls—who in their empty breasts approve the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows—how often he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of lead, were I not obliged to for the reason—
—that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised, then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day following to Maienthal,—and all they had left was to-morrow and to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself, being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain, the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy, the fairest and tenderest hearts,—I mean those of women.
This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,—"no, when she is dead,—then I will weep without concealment, and tell all men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the souper—a parson can give one—they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by the little Iris and express, Julia,—she can never, herself, undertake it,—a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia, and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...
SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Funeral-Discourse on Himself.—Two Opposite Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (mores) enough to teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds, hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the pulpit,—merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for it,—in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall. Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees of a stillborn fœtus, and proved by a short argument that a parson could demand of every fœtus—and though it were five nights old—the appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for otherwise he would be cheated out of his best fœtuses) could make every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."
With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my parson,—who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till on the third he became absolutely an angel,—the world should promise itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely, that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company, a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,—the three twins of course.
At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood Matthieu.—If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who, according to the assertion of Guliermus Parisiensis, flank a dying Abbess, is made much too small,[[39]] one can readily imagine how many devils may form the escorting squadron of a living, a blooming one. I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are male persons.
When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the stop,—but is it not with men as with organs, of which the human voice goes most finely with tremolos?—when she thus appeared, then had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.
He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams. He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations. Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees, had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through down below,—that the equality of kingdoms was a substitute or a preparation for the equality of ranks,—and that gunpowder, which had hitherto been the sticking powder of the great powers, would finally burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last, when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the North India, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics took—punch.
But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking. The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion, which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the steam; burn in a colored circle. The glass with its hot cloud is a Papin's digester[[40]] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A soft heart was of old ever associated with a bold, hardened fist. As it kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his shell-shaped sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as knight-errant,—whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.
Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining room, where her Agatha and all were,—it was not done from disapproval of decorous, manly festivity,—still less from embarrassment, as it is, in fact, easier, and made easier for her sex, to behave itself naturally under forty eyes than under four,—still less from inability to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and wishes, brought up as she had been among strangers, trained in thorny relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the Parson's wife, because it is a British custom, that the ladies shall take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.
When she was out of Victor's sight,—and when, from her present look of increased paleness, he drew the conclusion that the vale of Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect of the journey had brought no healing influence,—and when this short absence held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the death-apparition of an eternal one,—and when, at last, to be sure, the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,—then he rushed out into the winter,—bared his inflamed breast to the cooling flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its sorrows,—and ran up through the white night to the observatory;—and here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven, he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape, and in the broad snow-pierced night,—and all the tears of his heart fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers, now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into her brother's garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the blooming names had passed away into obscurity.
With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon drinking,[[41]] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said: "I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,—I preached here long ago in my childhood."
All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the following harangue:—
"Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!"
A mortal, deeply-afflicted hearers, may sink into the next world, without having a mourning-steed prance after him, just as he makes his entrance into this, without having a festive-nag trot before him. We, for our part, have jointly taken the funeral-cup beforehand, in order to be able to go through it all; for man expands by moistening, and shrinks up when he is dry, I mean, when he takes only solid food, like the bloodsucker, which, when out of water, loses four inches in length. And I hope I and the deeply afflicted funeral-procession have toasted the deceased sufficiently.
"And so then I see before me" ... —Here he beckoned to the Parson to toss out his nightcap, that something death-like might lie there on which his emotion could "vent itself—
"I see lying before me him, the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Court-Physician, Sebastian Victor von Horion, and dead he is and is about to go down under the covering of earth, into the place full of long repose. What do we see still lying at rest before us but the diving-bell, wherein the covered soul descended into this vapory life,—what but the dry shell of a kernel which is sown for the first time in a second planet,—what but his hull,—what but (so to speak) the cast-off nightcap of his awakened spirit?
"Behold, weeping hearers, this emblematic pale cap! Here it lies, the head is out of it, which once mused therein. Our Victor is gone and is hushed, who talked so often of mathematics, clinical medicine, heraldry, precautionary jurisprudence, medicina forensis, Sphragistics and their auxiliary sciences. We have lost much in him—who shall console you for this loss, excellent Herr von Schleunes, and the other gentlemen likewise? One has not however, absolutely, in this absurd life, which may well be a sort of ante-death, time enough to administer proper consolation. Not merely church-pews are often built on tombstones, but also princely chairs—they particularly—and even pulpits.
"Can it be supposed that thy soul, deceased Sebastian, in its intermediate state after death, should know anything of its body, from which it is unpacked, as out of its hat-box, and of the last honors which we here pay to its case? If it still has consciousness and an eye for this room, wherein it has been so often, then will it be glad that the three holy kings, of whom the Moor is Cato the Elder, are standing round its worm-bag, hardly willing to let the bag go; it must be pleased, that we are unitedly lamenting: where is his equal in common chemistry, in physiognomies and physiognomy,—in the modern languages,—in the doctrine of ribbons, from which he imbibed a love for all kinds of ribbons? Who sought less than he that strict concatenation of ideas, which misleads the Germans to cement good ones with bad ones, and to use more mortar than stones? Not even the Court—hence he never liked to go thither, when fun was going forward—could break him off from a certain serious sedate way, which he ran even into a ridiculous one, which last was always his aim.—By heaven! through the hour-glass of death, through which he peeped, as through a pocket spyglass, everything came out so small to him, that he knew not why he should be serious—I hope I may not be standing here alive and well, if in the aforesaid glass all the steps of the throne did not appear to him as diminutive as the thumb-long wood-stair of the tree-frog in his preserving jar.
"He was a very good preacher, particularly of funeral sermons, hence even a very good preacher asked him for godfather, and the godson stands among the present company and takes his part in the weeping, for the stomach-ache.... Only great court preachers, who deliver the princely funeral oration in the Cathedral Church, can boast of what I, to my greatest satisfaction, now hear, that they make the mourning company laugh, and this is to me an earnest that my consolation is effectual....
"And yet one who lies upon the death-bed has more consolation than one who only stands at the foot of the bed. The souterrain of the earth's crust is peopled only by still, reposing human beings, who draw close together; but above the souterrain stand their uneasy friends, and long to go down to the beloved arms of dust; for the linen on the eye of the dead is truly a padded hat for the cold brow, the coffin is a parachute to the unhappy, and the winding-sheet the last bandage of the widest wounds. Ah! why does weary man love better to sink into the short than into the long, undisturbed, sure sleep? Take, then, good Sebastian, the death-certificate as an eternal peace-instrument from the hand of gentle nature....
"But, the Deuse! where then is our dead man? what has the white cap to do down there? I see the corpse in the looking-glass opposite—it must be somewhere—I must fetch it":—with a shudder running through his soul he sprang down; an exalted frenzy passed, through the stages of tears, of smiles, of torpor, up and down his face. He ran behind a screen which had been placed before his wax statue—and brought out the waxen man—and threw him down as a corpse—and a veil was wound over the corpse—and with a distorted face he mounted the chair to proceed:—
"This is the night-corpse,—the scorified, carbonized man,—into such stiff lumps are conscious beings fastened and compelled to turn them round. Why do you tremble at me, hearers, because I tremble, to stare so at this overturned form of humanity?—I see a spectre hover round this corpse which is an 'I.' ... I! I! thou precipice that in the mirror of thought runnest back deep down into the darkness,—I! thou mirror within the mirror,—thou terror within a terror! Draw the veil away from the corpse! I will boldly look on the dead, till he destroys me."
Every one shuddered in response; but one of the Englishmen drew aside the veil from the dead.... Rigid, speechless, horror-struck and quaking, Victor looked upon the unveiled face, which also in a living shape hung round his soul; but at last tears gushed out down his cold cheeks, and then he spoke in a lower tone, as if his heart were melting:—
"See how the corpse smiles! why, then, dost thou smile so, Sebastian? Wast thou perchance so happy on the earth, that thy mouth stiffened and grew cold in a rapture of delight?... No, happy thou canst scarcely have been,—joy itself was often to thee a seed-vessel of sorrow. And thou saidst thyself very often, I am well contented and deserve hardly my hopes and wishes, to say nothing of their fulfilment.—
"Flamin! look upon this assumed countenance here,—it smiles from friendship, not from joy. Flamin, this extinct breast was arched over a heart that loved thee without limit, and even unto death.
"And this, after all, is the only misfortune of the poor man now at rest. In and for himself, and so far as concerned his original condition and temper, the good Bastian might have fared well enough; but he was too sensitive for joy,—too inconsiderate,—too ardent,—almost too much a child of fantasy. He wanted even to love (during his lifetime), and it could not be done. The flower-goddess of love passed by him, she denied him the transfiguration of man, the melodrama of the heart, the golden age of life.... Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears that flow from a tender heart, which breaks for love and finds none!...
"If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples, as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from sun and rain,—against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our sorrow.... Rest thou too, Horion!" ...
His grief at these words from the old dream so overmastered and so unmanned him that he passed over from it—by way either of excuse or of relief—into an almost frenzied humor.
"The whole joke, however, is half against my taste, which at court I wanted to cultivate. Life absolutely does not pay for one's scolding on its account at our good friend Death, or fumigating him with the incense of praise. The fear of dying excepted, there is nothing more pitiable than the fear of living. People of true talents should get drunk in order to see life in the right light, and afterward report it to us. The wretchedest of all (but so that human life in the comparison turns out still passable) is civil life, at which I could let fly for years, because it has nothing but long troughs for the stomach, from which hang down chains for the fancy,—because it perverts man into a cit,—because it turns our fleeting existence from a corn-field into a drill-plough,—because it exhales a pestilential vapor which lies thick before the grave and over the heavens, and in which the poor expeditionary committee-man, sweating, chewing, fat, and besmeared, without a warm sunbeam for his heart, without a streak of light for his eye, drives round, till the ramming-block of the pavior[[42]] pounds him down on the marshy ropewalk. The only advantage such a poor piece of marble has, out of which a pavement is made, instead of a statue, is that it looks upon the whole of human life as something really edifying, which it cannot sufficiently praise. And yet to us good fools the outer world could not appear so small, were there not something eternal and great within us, whereto we contrast it,—were there not a sunlight in us, which falls into this opera-house, just as the daylight, sometimes, when a door opens, falls in upon the nightly stage,—were it not that, like men in old pictures of the resurrection, we are half bedded in the earth and half out of it,—and if this ice-life were not an Aiguille percée,[[43]] and had not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen!
"I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing assembly, that I have been making an April-fool of it; for the dead man, whose funeral sermon I have been delivering, is really myself." ...
But here all his friends embraced him, in order to set limits to his ingenious frenzy,—and to press such an impassioned, true British heart to their own. The embrace softly warmed all his cold wounds, and he was healed, though exhausted; another's life grew into his, and love conquered death. The Englishmen, in whose eyes stood the tears of a double intoxication, could hardly tear themselves away from the humorous darling.
Clotilda, who with her female friends overheard the funeral oration in the adjoining chamber, at first held them back beseechingly from opening it. But when Victor said, "Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a tender heart that breaks for love,"—then she took leave of them with a hasty "good-night," unable to master an emotion which upheaved her whole being. When they reported to him the time of her withdrawal, then did he, who was now already so weary, weak, and tender, become inexpressibly so,—all the lights which his effort had brightened on his countenance seemed to melt away in love like moonlight in dew-drops,—he waited not for his chamber to be empty, but showed that which Clotilda in hers would conceal,—he could even contemplate the unveiled wax statue with softened spirit, and said smilingly: "I fancy, the reason why I have let the whole of me be repeated in wax is the same for which the Catholic does it with single limbs, in order to hang them on a saint, and thereby give thanks or pray for recovery; or like the Roman Emperors, whose wax statues the physicians visited after the death of the original."[[44]] The company went away, and he was at last alone. The moon, which had risen at 11 o'clock and 57 minutes, just began to throw its still low and waning light up against the windows of Clotilda's sitting-room. Victor put out his night-lamp, and, in order not to sink with his still tossing, dreaming heart into the dreams of sleep, seated himself at the window, almost in the wonted place of his wax copy and in a similar attitude—when fate ordained, that he, who to-day had given out the wax mummy to be his own person, should now inversely be looked upon as the image—by Clotilda! She stood at some distance from her window, on which no light fell but that from heaven; Victor, as this latter could not yet reach him, was quite in shadow, and turned towards her with five quarters of his profile. Scarcely had he observed that she fixed upon him an unchanging glance, that seemed as if it would not only take him in but go through him, when he guessed that she confounded him with the man of wax; he also observed out of the corner of his eye that something white fluttered around her, i. e. that she often dried her eyes. But how would it have been possible for his fine feeling by the least motion to take away from her her error, and to make her blush with confusion for her innocent gaze! Another, e. g. the misunderstood Mat, would in such an emergency have composedly straightened himself up and looked indifferently out of the window; but he ossified himself, as it were, in his attitude of lifelessness. But only the night and the distance could conceal from her his trembling, when her tears shed for his corpse seized like a hot stream his dismembered heart, and softened and dissolved the little of it which this evening had still left whole into a burning wave of love. Children's tears flow more freely, when one shows them sympathy; and in this hour of exhaustion, Victor, who was generally made more hard by another's sympathy for him, grew softer; and when Clotilda seated herself at the window, to lean upon it her weary head, it seemed to him as if something exhorted him now to verify that which he had said to-day to the statue: Cold form, erect thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a soft heart.
Clotilda at length closed the curtains and disappeared. But he still cautiously acted for some time longer the part of his image, and just when he made less effort to play the statue he succeeded better. All his thoughts flowed now like balm over the lacerated spots of his inner man, and he said: "Though thou art only my friend, I am satisfied, and thou canst appease this bosom's tumultuous yearnings. O, besides, this full heart would fly to pieces, if it should entertain the thought that thou lovest me!" For the rest he took home to himself to-day for the first time the improbability of his recent supposition, that a person so reserved as she could have demeaned herself in so unreserved a manner towards the blind Julius, and he asked himself: "Is there not, then, sufficient explanation of her departure from the court, in January's and Matthieu's unholy love, and the holy love of Emanuel?" But that she might not in the morning discover her erroneous confounding of things, he gave his wax figurant exactly the position which he had occupied at the window.
THIRD EASTER-HOLIDAY.
F. Koch's double Jews-harp.—The Sleigh-ride.—The Ball—and....
The reader will wish, with me, that the third Easter-holiday ended something worse than the long 28th Dog-Post-Day.
The sleigh went tolerably, so far as could be foreseen.—I however foresee yet something quite different: that half a million of my reading-customers (for the other half I will answer) cannot find out what is in my hero. It is therefore my office to tell them only so much as this: Victor was never pusillanimous, man's subjection to the yoke of fortune disgusted him; once every day Death took him up on the Sublime Arm, and let him, looking down therefrom, remark how diminutive were all mountains and hills, even graves. Every misfortune hardened him to steel, the Medusa's head of the death's-head turned him to stone, and the melting sun-glance of joyful emotion always vexed him in the remembrance. His sportive humor, his ideal of female perfection, the want of opportunity, and the shield of Minerva, had helped him along over the wind-months of feeling, and he had hitherto worshipped no other sun than the one which is twenty-one million miles distant,—till Heaven or the Devil brought along the nearer one, just in the year 1792. Still things would have gone quite tolerably, and the misfortune would have been easy enough to get through with, if he had been discreet or cool; I mean, if he had not said to himself: "It is fine to weep never for one's self, but yet for another; it is fine to worry down every loss, except that of a heart; and which will a departed friend from his lofty place count greater, if I deliver consolatory sermons to myself on his decease with true composure, or if I sink, yearning, after the loved one, in voluntary, overmastering sorrow?"
Thereby,—and from unacquaintance with the over-powering influence of noble but untamed feelings,—and because he confounded his previous accidental calm of the heart with a voluntary one,—and from an overflowing love of humanity,—he had intentionally let the feelers of his inner man up to this time grow too large,—and thus, by the whirl of all the previous influences, the previous bereavements, the previous emotions of these Easter-days, of this fair village of his youth, he had been driven so far out of his course, that, notwithstanding his considerateness, his court-life, his humor, he forfeited (at least for Easter) somewhat of his old dissimilarity to those geniuses who, like the sea-crab, stretch out feelers which a man can hardly span with his arms....
That sympathetic look of Clotilda which yesterday, after his previous heat, had been a cooling balm, was to him to-day a very burning one; the thought of her eye full of tears for him conjured up all the days of his love for her and her whole image in his heart. I am convinced that not even the Regency-Counsellor, who, for the rest, might by yesterday's funeral-sermon have lost something of his jealousy, as well as, by the republican diversion, somewhat of his love for Clotilda, failed to note the drunken and dreamy look of his eye. The parsonage itself was fortunately to-day an exchange, or a spiritual intelligence-office and recruiting-house; the Chaplain registered—not any of your French car tel est notre plaisir, but—the catechumens who were to confess at Whitsuntide.
He would not go over to the castle—his misunderstood friend Mat had already by ten o'clock called to him out of the window a morning-greeting and congratulation upon the snow-storm—until his sleigh had come from the city, so that he might start off at once, because he would not show over yonder any ridiculous emotion. Since the great world had become for him a work-day world, to disguise his feelings from it became harder; one conceals one's self most easily from those whom one respects.
But the three twins and Franz Koch carried him over earlier than he would have gone, as early as half past five o'clock in the afternoon.
The name of Franz Koch in the Dog's papers made me jump off of my feet. If any one of my readers is a guest of the Carlsbad waters, or should happen to be his Majesty, the King of Prussia, William the Second, or one of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick, or any other princely person, he has heard the good Koch, who is a modest pensioned soldier, and travels round everywhere with his instrument and plays on it. This instrument, which he calls the double Jews-harp, or mouth-harmonica, consists of an improved pair of jaw-drums, or humming jaws-harps, played at once, which he shifts according to the piece he is playing. His handling of the buzzing-irons bears the same relation to the old Jews-harp playing as harmonica-bells do to servants' bells. I am under obligation to induce such of my readers as have wren's wings to their fancy, or at least, from the heart upwards are lithopædia (petrified fœtuses), or have the ear-drum membrane for nothing but to be drummed on,—to induce, I say, with the little oratory I have, such readers to tumble the aforesaid Franz out of the house, if he undertakes to come and buzz before them. For it amounts to just nothing, and the wretchedest bass-viol or rebeck screams louder in my opinion; nay, its hum is so low, that he played at Carlsbad before not more than twelve customers at once, because one cannot sit near enough to him, particularly as in his leading pieces he has the light carried away, that neither eye nor ear may disturb the fantasies. If, however, a reader is differently constituted,—a poet, perchance,—or a lover,—or very tender,—or like Victor,—or like me; then, indeed, let him without scruple listen with still and melting soul to Franz Koch, or—for to-day is just the time when he is not to be had—to me.
The jolly Englishman had sent this harmonist to Victor with the card: "The bearer of this is the bearer of an echo which he carries in his pocket." Victor preferred, therefore, to take him over to the friend of all sweet tones, that her departure might not deprive her of this melodious hour. It seemed to him like going through a long church, when he entered Clotilda's Loretto-chapel; her simple chamber was like Mary's sitting-room, enclosed with a temple. She had already completed arranging herself in her black ornamental dress. A black costume is a fine eclipse of the sun, wherein one absolutely cannot take one's eyes away from it: Victor, who, with his Chinese regard for this color, brought with him to-day to this magic a defenceless soul, an enkindled eye, grew pale and confused at the radiant face of Clotilda, over which the trace of a trouble that had rained out, hovered like a rainbow over the bright, blue sky. It was not the cheerfulness of light thoughts, which every maiden takes on when she dresses herself, but the cheerfulness of a pure soul full of patience and love. He trembled lest he should tread on two kinds of thistles,—on the painted ones of the floor, over which he took care to step, and upon the satirical ones of the fine observers around him, with which he was always coming in contact. Her stepmother was still upon the stucco-work and finishing of her worm-bag,[[45]] and the Evangelist was in her toilet-chamber as assistant-priest and collaborator in the finery department. So that Clotilda had still time to hear the performer on the mouth-harmonica; and the Chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and my hero for he was a father of good breeding towards his daughter—as part of the audience, although he could make little out of music, table- and ball-music excepted.
Victor now saw for the first time, by Clotilda's delight in the musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart loved to tremble in unison with strings; in fact, he was often mistaken about her, because she—like thee, dearest * * *—expressed her highest praise as well as her highest censure by silence. She begged her father, who had already heard the mouth-harmonica in Carlsbad, to give her and Victor an idea of it,—he gave it: "It expressed in masterly manner, not so much the fortissimo as the piano-dolce, and, like the simple harmonica, was best adapted to the adagio." She answered,—leaning on the arm of Victor, who led her into a still chamber darkened for the occasion,—"music was perhaps too good for drinking-songs and for mirthful sensations. As sorrow ennobled man, and, by the little cutting pangs which it gave him, unfolded him as regularly as they do the buds of the carnation, which they slit open with a knife that they may bloom without bursting; so music as an artificial sorrow took the place of the true." "Is the true so rare?" said Victor in the dark chamber which only one wax-taper lighted. He came close to Clotilda, and her father sat opposite to him.
Blissful hour! thou—that didst once, with the echo-strains of this harmonica, pass through my soul,—glide along by me once more, and let the resonance of that echo again murmur around thee!
But scarcely had the modest, quiet virtuoso put the instrument of enchantment to his lips, when Victor felt that now (before the light was removed) he should not dare to do as at other times, when he pictured to himself at every adagio appropriate scenes, and underlaid every piece with peculiar fantasyings for its texts. For it is an unfailing method of giving tones their omnipotence, when one makes them the accompanying voices of our inner mood, and so out of instrumental music makes as it were vocal music, out of inarticulate tones articulate ones, whereas the fairest series of tones, which no definite subject arranges into alphabet and speech, glides off from bathed, but not softened hearts. When, therefore, the sweetest sounds that ever flowed over human lips as consonants of the soul began to well forth from the trembling mouth-harmonica,—when he felt that these little steel-rings, as if they were the setting and touch-board[[46]] of his heart, would make their agitations his own,—then did he constrain his feverish heart, on which, besides, all wounds came out to-day, to shrink up against the tones, and not picture to itself any scenes, merely that he might not burst into tears before the light was gone.
Higher and higher swept the drag-net of uplifting tones with his heart in its grasp. One melancholy remembrance after another said to him in this short ghostly hour of the past, "Crush me not out, but give me my tear." All his imprisoned tears were clustered around his heart, and in them his whole inner being, lifted from the ground, softly swam. But he collected himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself," he said to himself, "not even a moist eye? No, with a dry eye receive this sad, stifled echo of thy whole breast, receive this resonance from Arcadia, and all these weeping sounds, into a broken heart."—Amidst such a secret melting away, which he often took for composure, it always seemed within him as if a breaking voice from a far region addressed him, whose words had the cadence of verses; the breaking voice again addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of vanished hopes? Do not these sounds, Horion, run into one another like human days? O, look not on thy heart; on the dust-cloud of the crumbling heart, as on a mist, the gleaming forms of former days cast their image."—Nevertheless he still answered calmly, "Life is truly too short for two tears,—the tear of woe, and the other." ... But now, as the white dove, which Emanuel saw fall in the churchyard, flew through his imaginings,—as he thought to himself, "This dove, truly, once fluttered in my dream of Clotilda, and clung to the ice-mountains; ah! it is the image of the fading angel beside me,"—and as the tones fluttered more and more faintly, and at last ran round in the whispering leaves of a death-garland,—and as the breaking voice returned again and said: "Knowest thou not the old tones? Lo! they sounded in thy dream before her birthday festival, and there made the sick soul beside thee sink up to her heart in the grave, and she left nothing behind for thee but an eye full of tears, and a soul full of grief"—"No, that was all she left me," said in broken tones his weary heart, and all his suppressed tears gushed in torrents from his eyes....
But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first stream fell unseen into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber." Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the shore and yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear, what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains, dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float, swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving, swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills, and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy evening, ere it sets in bliss?
O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou, dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad, tranquil, and eternal bliss....
"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion's dissolving soul, whose rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, there will lie the region where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out my arms toward her, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart. Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was my life;—then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay, man is unhappy, but only on the earth."
O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother, sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which thou hidest,—ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....
The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.
But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the "Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more faintly through the past years that repose back of man's memory,—at last only murmur under the dawn of life,—only well up inaudibly under the cradle of man,—and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the midnight, when each of us was not,—then does man, deeply moved, cease any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.
The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor heard Clotilda's first sigh.
Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an open grave.
She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison with his.
Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a whole past,—then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to the last which lay round about heaven,—then the tone expired and flew as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.
Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on Victor's hand.
Her friend was overpowered,—she was carried away,—he pressed the soft hand,—she drew it out of his,—and went slowly out of the chamber, in order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose sweet signs night hung her veil....
The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body. Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor, merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in the sleigh,—the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light. As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through vivacity of expression;—in short, it was well that they started.
He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh. The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation, let him think as much as he would,—he ran through Clotilda's, Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,—nothing occurred to him. The reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand, returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go into the world,—there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs, like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it; the hard fruits hang higher."
They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her remark was her own history. But the new scenes,—the rattling carriages and rustling dresses,—the much ado about little or nothing,—the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,—the double mouth-unharmonicas,—the masculine court-fauna,—the feminine court-flora,—the whole mobilized pleasure camp,—this din of a fair drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious souls.
Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in addition to her cold angry friendliness, a montre à régulateur rich in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on whom, besides, every sorrow produced the witty effect of intoxication, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his vivacity.
A woman betrays herself by the opposite,—Clotilda by nothing. He expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight (if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic twilight,—then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its way hither but a soft echo,—and then if in the glimmering maze, breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."
But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce the motion as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the first place, is sublime,—that is to say, of great masses; or rather every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of ignes fatui in the churchyard.
To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.
As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes, accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least, looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had set,—and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung undisturbed on the still soul,—the many incisions made by the grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,—the clipped roots which fate shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before transplanting into another soil,—and the thousand honey-vessels of sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice nothing but herself;—and as he held the thought before his mind how she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;—he had to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which nevertheless was not happy.