Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/invisiblelodge00paulgoog

THE

INVISIBLE LODGE

FROM THE GERMAN OF

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER

BY

CHARLES T. BROOKS

TRANSLATOR OF "TITAN," AND "HESPERUS"

* * * *

NEW YORK

UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY

SUCCESSORS TO

JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY

142 TO 150 WORTH STREET

Copyright, 1883
by
Henry Holt & Co.

MOTTO:

MAN IS THE GREAT----[^[1]] IN THE BOOK OF NATURE.
("SELECTIONS FROM THE PAPERS OF THE DEVIL.")

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

This work was the forerunner (and, according to its Author's nephew and biographer, the cradle), of some of his principal subsequent Romances, especially Hesperus and Titan. "The Invisible Lodge," says Spazier, "is, in more than one sense, the Genesis of Jean Paul's poetic world and its inhabitants--the birth history of his first Romances." It is peculiarly interesting as containing, both in spirit and in incident, a good deal of Richter's own biography. It was written in 1792, when the Author was 29 years old, and is the work which decided, if not his reputation, at least his determination to make his countrymen appreciate his work and his worth. It was the first of his productions which, he felt, was somewhat munificently paid for, as it gave him the joy of bursting in upon his poor old mother and pouring some 250 dollars into her lap.

The date of this work is the transition period in the Author's life, when (in his own words) he came out of the "vinegar manufactory," where he had concocted his "Greenland Law-suits," and "Papers of the Devil," and passed through the "honey-sour" interval which gave birth to the Idyl of the "Contented Little Schoolmaster, Wutz," into the happier and more harmonious period which began with the "Invisible Lodge."

In this Romance, says Mrs. Lee, "the different epochs in the history of his soul are embodied." "To Ottomar he has given his dreams and aspirations; to Fenk his satire and comic humor; and in Gustavus the events of his autobiography are clothed in a poetic garment."

A few weeks before his death, which took place in November 1825, (and of which he seems to have had a singular presentiment not long before this book was written), referring to its abrupt ending he says: "What life in the world do we see that is not interrupted and incomplete? And if we complain that a Romance is left unfinished--that it does not even inform us what came of Kunz's second courtship and Elsie's despair on the occasion--how Hans escaped the claws of the sheriff, and Faust those of Mephistopheles--still let us console ourselves with the reflection that man, in his present existence, sees nothing on any side but knots, that only beyond his grave lie the solutions, and that all History is to him an unfinished Romance.

"Baireuth, Oct. 1825."

On the 14th of the month following, the hand that penned these lines was cold in death. C. T. B.

Newport, Oct. 1882.

FIRST SECTION.

Courting by Chess.--Graduated Recruit.--Copulative Cat

In my opinion, what made the Head-forester Von Knör so incredibly sharp-set upon chess was, that from one year's end to the other, he had nothing to do but to be, once during that time, the guest, the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood and the Dispenser of Bulls to the rangers.

The reader can surely never have heard of an amateur with so extravagant a passion as his. The least he could do was to send for all his servants to the village of Strehpcnik, (where one gains as much immunity from taxation by chess as a nobleman does by a Saxon Diet,) in order that he might (though in a different sense from that of Cato) have as many opponents as servants. For another instance, he and a nobleman of Upper Yssel in Zwoll spent more postal money in writing than in riding, inasmuch as they played chess at a distance of 250 miles, not with fingers, but with pens. Still another fact may satisfy the reader, viz., that he and Kempele's Automaton Chess-player corresponded with each other, and that the fellow-lodger and adjutant of the wooden Moslem, Herr von Kempele, once in my presence wrote back to him from Hay street in Leipsic, in the name of the Mussulman, that the latter castled. The reader will have his own reflections on the subject, when told that the man, within two years, traveled away to Paris, to go to the Palais Royal and to the Société du Salon des Echecs, and to sit down there as chess-combatant, and jump up again as chess-conqueror, although he was afterward cudgeled much too severely in a democratic street, for having cried out in sleep: Gardez la Reine! It may simply seem striking to one and another that his daughter never could win a new hat from him or a new dressing-maid (soubrette) to put it on for her, except by winning at the same time a game of chess. But one thing will astonish and vex all who read me, of either sex and of every age, namely, that the Head-forester had sworn he would give his daughter to no other beast in the whole knightly circle but the one who should win not only her heart but at the same time the victory over her in a game of chess--and that in seven weeks.

The ground he took, and his chain of reasoning, was this: "A good mathematician is a good chess-player; therefore, vice-versâ--a good mathematician knows the Differential Calculus ten times better than a poor one,--and a good master of Differentiation understands himself as well as any one in the matter of wheeling and deploying,[^[2]] and consequently can command his company (and his wife, in fact,) at any hour--and why then should not one give so accomplished, so experienced an officer, his only daughter?" My reader would certainly have seated himself forthwith at the chess-board and thought to himself: the drawing of such a quaternion[^[3]] from the board as the daughter of a Head-forester, is an extraordinarily easy matter; but it is confoundedly hard when the father himself watches behind her chair, and prompts the daughter in every move whereby she is to guard her king and the maiden-queen (herself) from my reader.

No one who had heard of it could comprehend why the Forester's Lady, who had long been the Maid of Honor to a Countess von Ebersdorf, with her fine feelings and her piety, could tolerate such a hunter's-whim; but the truth is, she had a Moravian fancy of her own to carry out, namely, that the first child of her daughter Ernestina should be trained for Heaven; that is to say eight years under the earth--"eighty years for all me!" said the old man.

Now, although in any case one has a plaguey hard time with a daughter, whether one would draw subscribers (i. e. suitors) to her or drive them away, nevertheless Knör found in this case his true heaven upon earth--among so many Knights of Chess, all fighting for his Ernestina and losing her and the game. For she, with a head into which her father had poured light, and a heart into which her mother had infused virtue, could conquer more easily than be conquered; hence a whole brigade of youthful suitors vexed and played themselves almost to death. And yet there were some among them who in all castles round about claimed the name of sweet gentlemen because they had not sailors' manners, as, in comparison with briny and bitter sea-water, we call our flat, fresh water sweet.

But the reader and I will jump over the whole company of players, and place ourselves beside the Cavalry Captain, von Falkenberg, who is standing by the father and who is also bent upon marriage. This officer--a man of courage and good nature, without any principles, except that of honor; who, in order not to "write any thing behind his ears" as the phrase is, i. e., not to lay up any grudge against another (the ears, especially when of some length, being generally the black-board and tally-stick of received offences), would rather box those of other Christians; who acted more finely than he spoke, and whose full-length portrait[^[4]] I have not room enough to spread out between these two dashes--had continued enlisting recruits in this part of the country so long that at last his affections were enlisted by Ernestina. There was nothing he hated so much as chess and Moravianism; meanwhile Knör said to him: At twelve o'clock tonight the seven tournament-weeks of the game were to begin, and if at twelve o'clock, seven weeks hence, he had not sent his antagonist from the battle-field to the bridal chamber he should be heartily sorry, and all the eight years' education would then go for nothing.

For the first fourteen days the playing and--loving went on in fact too negligently. But at that time neither I nor other clever people had written those ardent romances, wherewith--a serious thing for us to answer for--we transform young people into crackling, roaring, rotatory stoves of love, which burst with the heat and become calcined, and after marriage can no more be heated. Ernestina was one of those daughters who are on hand when one gives the order: "Next Sunday, God willing, at four o'clock, when Herr A. or Z. comes, you are to fall in love with him." The Captain, in the article of love, bit neither into the fermenting pumpernickel or rye-bread of the physical sensation, nor into the white, weak flour-bread of the Parisian sentiment, nor into the quiddany (the quince marmalade) and heaven's bread of the Platonic, but into a fine slice of the home-made brown-bread of conjugal affection; he was thirty-seven years old. Sixteen years before he had cut off a bit of the aforesaid pumpernickel: his mistress and his and her son were afterward married by the respectable commercial agent, Röper.

We Belletrists, on the contrary, can make it of great practical use in our romances, that it agrees right well with our maw and the coat of our stomach, when in the same afternoon we cut for ourselves from those four sorts of bread at once; for we must ourselves be old Harrys to depict old Harrys; how could we manage it otherwise, when, in the self-same month, out of the self-same heart, as well as the self-same bookstore (I shall be vexing Herr Adelung[^[5]] here by the word "self-same"--nämlich), we have to issue satires and eulogies--night-thoughts--night-scenes--war-songs--idyls--bawdy ditties and solemn dirges, so that behind and before us people stand astonished to see Pantheon and Pandemonium under one roof--more than they were over the postmortem stomach of the galley-slave Bazile, in which was found a household property of thirty-five effects, such as pipe-heads, leather, and bits of glass.

When the two young people sat down at the chessboard, which was to be either their partition-wall or their bridge, the father stood by all the time as marker; it was, however, quite unnecessary--not merely because the Captain played so miserably and his antagonist so Philidorically; but for the additional reason, that the female laws of etiquette forbade her to be mated or to fall in love (for women and oarsmen always turn their backs to the shore toward which they are seeking to propel themselves)--but for a still more remarkable reason the auxiliary forester might have been dispensed with, namely, that Ernestina wanted above all things to be checkmated, and for that very reason she played so well. For out of spite against dilatory fate, one sets himself on purpose to work against the very things that depend upon him, and desires them nevertheless. The two warring powers grew, indeed, more and more fond of each other, even in proportion as they were afraid of forfeiting each other; nevertheless it was not in the power of the female party to omit a single move which contravened her two-fold desire: in five weeks the recruiting officer could not once say: Check to the queen! Besides, women play this king's game admirably well (as they do other games of kings).... But as this seems to be a digression of nature, though it is none; still an authorial one can be made out of it, only not until the Twentieth Sector; because I must first have written two or three months, till I have so spun up the reader into my web, that I can pluck or pull him just as I please.

Had the Captain's love been of the modern gigantic sort, which, not like a gently unfolding zephyr, but like a shaking tempest, grasps the green, thin flowrets, that cannot at all adapt themselves to the belletrical hurricane, then the least he could have done would have been to be at once a very devil; but as it was he was merely angry, not with the father, but with the daughter; and that not because she did not make the chess-board a presentation-dish of her hand and heart, or because she played well against him, but because she played so very well. Such is man! and I beseech fellow-men not to laugh at my Captain. To be sure, if I had had the female charms of Ernestina, and had looked into his puzzled face, as he meditated his counter-approaches, and seen how on its rounded mouth stood that pain at undeserved affliction which wears such a touching aspect in men of spirit, where it is not distorted by the arthritic knots and cutaneous eruptions of revenge, I should have grown red and should verily have plunged with my queen, (and myself too), into check: for what could I have loved in that case but a stern self-sacrifice?

By the 16th of June, Ernestina could herself almost have delighted in such sacrifice, as will presently be seen from a letter of hers. For a woman is certainly capable of maintaining for twice 24 hours one and the same sentiment towards a man (though not towards any other object), provided she has nothing of this man before her but his image in her fair little head; but, let the man himself, uncopied, stand, five feet high, before her, she can no longer achieve it; her feelings, playing like a column of gnats in a sunbeam, the merest trifle about the aforesaid man will chase them away from each other, and against each other, in among each other, e. g., a thimble-full too much or too little of powder upon him, a stoop of the upper part of his body, a finger-nail cut to the quick, a scurfy, self-peeling under-lip, the powder-margin and play-ground of the queue on the back of his coat, long side-whiskers--in fact anything. I have a hundred reasons for breaking open here before the eyes of the indiscreet reader Ernestina's letter to a retired court-lady in the residence-city of Scheerau; she had to write to her every week, because there was an expectation of inheriting in that quarter, and because Ernestina herself had once been with her and in the city long enough to be well able to bring away with her eleven thousand city notions--that is, three weeks.

"Last week I had really nothing to write you but the old song. Our playing is infinitely tedious to me and I only pity the Captain; but no talking avails anything with my father, so long as he can have any one to see play. Were it not better, the good Captain should wake up his coachman, who sits snoring all day long in the servants' room, and harness up and drive off? Ever since Sunday we have been in one round of torment over a single game, and I have already leaned one elbow sore--to night must end it.

"Twelve o'clock at night.--He loses his knights every time and by my queen. When he has once married, I will show him his mistakes and my strokes of art, I am bored to death, gracious Aunt.

"June 16th.--In four days I am free from my player and chess-board, and I will not seal this, till I can write you how he behaved towards his tired and innocent basket-maker. To-day we played up in the little Chinese pavilion. As the ruddy evening-twilight, which fell directly into his face, threw confused shadows among the pieces, and as I looked with pity at his right fore-finger, which had a red line left by a sabre-stroke and which lay on the rim of the chess-board; in my absence of mind I actually lost my queen, and the abominable baptismal tolling of the Chinese chime almost deprived me of the power of forming a plan--fortunately my father came back and helped me a little. Afterward I took him round through the improvements in our grove and he told me, I fancy, the history of his marked finger; he is very wild towards his equals, but withal uncommonly obliging to ladies.

"June 18th.--Since yesterday we have all been somewhat merrier. In the evening two under-officers brought five recruits, and as we were told that there was a man among them who could set a whole defeated army to laughing, we all went down in a body. Down below there the man was just whispering half aloud into another recruit's ear that he had a row of false teeth set in his jaw and they all fell out except a corner tooth when he bit off a cartridge; but all he wanted was to secure the bounty money. At our request he screwed the hat off of his head, but a white cap, which reached down so as to cover the eyebrows, he pulled down still lower. If he should take that off, he said, he should never in his life get to the command of a regiment. One of the subalterns began to laugh, and said, he does it merely because he has, underneath, three abominable birthmarks, nothing more--and a comrade stepped up behind him and slyly whisked off the cap from his head. Hardly had there sprung forth, to our astonishment, a head which showed on both temples two flaming birthmarks, a silhouette with a natural queue, and, opposite, two pole-cats' tails, when to our still greater astonishment the Captain clasped the figured head and kissed it as passionately as if it were his own bodily brother, and seemed as if he would laugh himself to death for joy. 'Thou art forever Dr. Fenk and nobody else!' said he. He must be very intimate with the Captain and comes direct from Upper-Scheerau. Don't you know him? The Prince has him travel to Switzerland and Italy as botanist and companion to his natural son, Captain Von Ottomar, as you will have already known. He perpetrates crazy jokes, if it is true, as he swears, that this is his 21st disguise and that he is just so many years old. He looks badly; he says himself, his broad chin turns up like a beaver's tail and that the barber really shaves the half wilderness for him gratis, equal to two beards--his lips are slit away to the wisdom teeth and his little eyes sparkle all day long. For people, too, who are not his equals, his jokes are much too free."

Ernestina here cuts a silhouette of the Doctor's outer man, which, like many Indian trees, under external spines and thorny foliage concealed the soft and precious fruit of the most humane heart. I, however, shall be able to draw him quite as well as our correspondent can. As humorists like him are seldom handsome--female humorists still less so--and as the spirit travesties itself and the face, of course (he said) the finest dress could be of no service to any man--to himself and the handsome ones least of all--but only to the drapers. Hence his pieces of uniform were divided into two departments,--the splendid ones (that people might see he did not wear the poor ones from poverty) and these same poor ones, which he generally had on at the same time with the others. Were not the sail-flaps of the handsomest embroidered waistcoat all the time sticking out from under a fox-brown overcoat, which was almost lost at the top in his hair-bag? Had he not, under a 1½ Louis d'or hat, hung on a disgraceful queue, for which he had given no more than six farthings of our present money? To be sure, it was half out of exasperation against this so tasteless crab's-tail of the head, against this telescope-like shortening and elongating spinal pendent to the fourth, thought-full cerebral chamber. His writing-set had to be much more elegant than his dinner-set and his paper whiter than his linen; he could never tolerate poor little pens or pen-feathers anywhere except on his hat, which his bed--and the disorder, natural to him as a bachelor--improved, so to speak, into a nobleman's plumed hat; meanwhile, to keep the bed feathers in his hair company he placed behind his ears good sea-quills--the chief commissary might have worn them behind his at the Diet with honor.

But not to make himself a mere oddity in dress, a separatist in his attire, he had a counterfeit presentment of himself taken from year to year after the best styles of the Journal of Follies, and pretended that he must, after all, show the people that he or his knee-piece knew how to keep up side by side perhaps with the latest exquisites. The lower rim of his overcoat, like man himself, was often made out of earth; but he insisted upon it, that one should tell him what harm it would do if he should, in his own person, carry things to the extent that a stocking maker did--whose history I will at once relate, in order not to write without any moral. The man referred to had the good and droll habit when he brought his stockings to town on his back to deliver them, of never brushing or rubbing off the border of dirt with which his surtout fringed itself. He simpler took a large pair of shears and carefully cut off each time the newly formed miry margin and filthy horizon. Now, the longer it rained the shorter the dimensions to which his frock shrunk up, and on the shortest day the epitomizer, by reason of the unprecedented weather, went round in the shortest surtout--in a neat 16mo edition of the former folio edition. The moral I would draw from this is the following question: Should not a wise State, which is certainly seventy times shrewder than all stocking weavers put together, who are themselves, indeed, only members of it, take the best course to imitate the fringed stocking weaver; namely, instead of wasting the time rubbing and scrubbing its filthy members (thieves, adulterers, etc.), to cut them off with the sword, or otherwise make short work with them?

Doctor Fenk diverted and dissipated by whimsical consolation the solitary curses which his friend the Captain vented instead of sighs. He said he had remarked in Ernestina more than once, at some specially good move of his making, no other start than one of pleasure. He would stake his traveling money upon it that she, as she loved him, was nursing some trick in her head which would pave his way or frame his staircase to the bridal chamber. He advised him to appear distrait and inattentive, so as not to detect and disturb her in the hatching of her secret plan. He asked him: "Do you understand perfectly the minor offices of love?" No German comprehended metaphors less than the Captain. "I mean," he continued, "can you not, then, be out and out the most crafty vocativus? Can you not retain hold for a long time of the piece you mean to move, so as to keep your hand a long time over your chess-militia, and with your hand make the Generalissima fall into agitation and love? Can you not change every minute your attitudes towards this fair foe, and especially contrive to lift yourself up, because a man standing seems better looking to a woman who is sitting than to one who stands? I and she should see you now leaning back in your chair, now stretching forward, now to the left, now to the right, now in the shade, now with your eyes fixed on her hand, now on her lips, during the game. Nay, you should knock three or four pawns over on to the floor merely that you may have to stoop over to pick them up, so that your swelling facial veins might make an impression on her heart, and that you might drive the blood up into your own head and hers at the same time. Let your queue be buckled an eighth of an ell nearer the occiput or farther from it, in case such buckling and such distance has hitherto counteracted your marriage prospects." The poor Captain neither understood nor performed a single iota of the whole service-regulation, and the Doctor was quite as well satisfied, for it was a part of his humor that he loved no party to talk to better than the wind.

Ernestina goes on with her letter:

"To-morrow, thank God, my Passion weeks come to an end; and it is fortunate for the Captain, who grows daily more sensitive, that no one is present but the Doctor, who has a pat joke for every move that is made. His wit, he says, proves he himself is a miserable player, because good players never make a bonmot upon or during their play.

"June 20, 3 o'clock.--This evening at 12 o'clock I shall be unlocked from the foot-block of the chess-board. He will play all day at the rubber, the Definitive match--Fenk calls it--but at night, as he guesses from his day's campaign the result of the nightly one, he has ordered his coachman to drive up with his carriage, so that, like a corpse, he may mournfully depart. Only he should not expect me to play as badly as he does. But he is in all things so hasty, and stops his ears against all remonstrances.

"12 o'clock at night.--I am beside myself. Who would have believed it of my father? My game could hardly have stood better--by my father's second-hand watch, which lay near the chess-board, it was already considerably more than half-past eleven--he had only two officers and I still had all mine; one flying streak of red after another darted across his whole face. It grew at last really oppressive, and even the Doctor no longer spoke a playful word--only my white pussy marched round purring on the table. Naturally no human being is thinking of the cat, and for the first time in the game he gives me check. Just then he (or was it I, for I sometimes beat such little trills on the table) might have made some such slight drumming with his fingers on the edge of the board. Like lightning the creature flew at it, thinking probably it was a mouse, and knocked our whole game into pi and there we sat. Imagine the scene:--I half glad that this middle person had relieved him of the shame of the formal basket; he with a face full of disconsolateness and wrath; my father with one full of wrath and confusion; and the Doctor looking round the room and snapping his fingers and swearing: 'The Captain would have beaten as sure as Amen!' Not a foot budged from the spot; the Doctor did not stay a minute on his, and finally in a fit of enthusiasm which our embarrassed silence more and more intensified, threw himself on his knees before a white bust of Cupid, before a miniature of my father, and before his own image in the looking-glass, and prayed: 'Holy Herr von Knör! holy Cupid! holy Fenk! pray for the Captain, and strike the cat dead! Ah! were you three images alive, then would Cupid surely assume the form of Dr. Fenk, and Cupid who had thus come to life would grasp the hand of the now animated Knör, and place in it that of the female player; then would his give hers to still a third. Ye saints! pray, I beseech you, for the Captain, who would have won the game!' But that is not true; only, unfortunately, the interval was too short to begin a new one."

Now, as at this point the pole-cat-Doctor (I, as author, resume my narrative) rose up and actually laid Knör's hand in that of Ernestina and said he was Cupid--and inasmuch as, after all, by the assurances of the Doctor and by the uncertainty of the game, the player, teased by men and cats, had quite as much to lose in the matter of honor as in that of love; and as I show in a whole Sector that Falkenberg was of the oldest nobility in the whole land; and as, luckily, in the Head-forester (as with many of the rural nobility) the manners of his rude breeding lay half-hid under the varnish of those derived from his more refined intercourse, just as his old furniture was under that of the new fashion; thus the electric enthusiasm of the Doctor passed over in great sparks into the bosom of the father, and Knör in transport laid the hand of Ernestina, who feigned astonishment, in that of the Captain, who really felt it; and the bridegroom rushed and threw himself in a tempest of gratitude upon the neck of the new-born father-in-law, even before--inasmuch as his honor triumphed more than his love--he somewhat more coldly kissed the clever hand which had hitherto snatched from him this double triumph.

For this the fair possessor of the hand blamed him; but I again impute the blame to her; with what reason can she expect it of the man who never divined a soul, hardly his own, and never that of a woman, that he should have had his wisdom-teeth and his philosophic beard grown as long as the indulgent reader has both, who, of course, does not need to learn for the first time, and to have it printed here beforehand--for he has already remarked it these three good hours--that behind the copulative cat there lay (or lied)[^[6]] something, viz., Ernestina herself.

This is how it was. But I need hardly inform the reader of what he has long since known, that Ernestina had, privatissime, each of four evenings previous, placed the glue-and-stitch cat on the table, and instructed her to dart at the fingers when she heard them drumming; and I am glad the acuteness of the reader is as much above the ordinary as it is, because now he can go on and surmise still more: for she also on the final evening, made the paste-eel of a cat creep after her as a lime-rod, kept her till half-past eleven o'clock down in her lap, and at last with a movement of her knee threw up this feline terminus medius out of her lap on to the table, and the terminus after that did her part. Poor Captain!

But it is a matter for serious reflection. For if, in this way, women can transmute design into accident, and vice versâ--if, even before betrothal (consequently still more afterwards), they know how to place in the front rank against men (as Cambyses did against the Egyptians)[^[7]], confederate cats, who, like inferior interposing Deities ex-machinâ upset the male game and set up the female--if in a hundred human beings there are only five men who can tolerate bestial cats or, in fact, human ones, and only ten women who can not--if, most manifestly, the best women carry under their arms terrible bundles of man-traps, hares'-nets, lark springes, night-nets, and draw-nets; what shall the uniped or one-leg[^[8]] do who, on the very same day when he has begun writing a romance, begins at the same time to play one, and so would fain carry through both simultaneously as on a double harpsichord? The most remarkable thing for me to do, I see, is to let my wife stand all day by me bear-trap, and throw twigs on it, that I may stumble into it, but absolutely place no bear there, though no ape either. No! ye pliable, oppressed creatures! I once more propose to myself the undertaking, and publicly make the vow to one of you here, in print. Should it happen, nevertheless, that I wanted after the honeymoon to plague the one, then I merely read out aloud this Sector, and move my heart with the coming picture of your connubial Pilatus; which, for that reason, I here bring forward--namely, how the stupidest man accounts himself shrewder than the shrewdest wife; how before him, who, perhaps, out of the house lies on his knee, to be blest, before a goddess or idol, she must sink down on hers, like the camel, to be loaded; how he sweetens his Imperial Chancery decrees, and his Plebiscita, (after the mildest remonstrances have been ventured only in a doubtful and desperate voice of resignation, as if of a lost cause), with nothing better than a "but if I choose to have it so;" how the very tear which fascinated him in the free eye of the bride, now disenchants and makes him quite frantic, when it drops from that of the wedded wife, just as in the "Arabian Nights" all enchantments and disenchantments are effected by sprinkling with water--verily, the only good thing about it after all is just this, that you do really delude him. Ah! and when I once bring it home to myself, how far such a married Bruin must have gone before you went so far as, in order not to be devoured by him, actually to make believe fall in a swoon (as one does with the actual bears in the forest) and Bruin stalked with his idle paws round the seeming corpse! ...

"In my old age the one-leg shall whistle a different tune!" says the married reader; but I am myself already nine years older than he, and still single into the bargain.

SECOND SECTION.

Price-Current of the Wholesale Pedigree-Merchant.--The Stallion and the Patent of Nobility

There is not in the whole known world a more pestilent job than that of writing a first section; and if I were not in all my life to write any other sections, a second, a tenth, a thousandth, I would rather make logarithms or publicistic reports of Circles than a book with æsthetic ones. On the contrary, in the second chapter and sector an author comes to himself again, and knows full well in the most distinguished circle, perhaps, that exists (in mine are nothing but snobs) what he is to set about with his writing-fingers, and with his hat, head, wit, penetration, and everything.

As the wedded pair, from whose betrothal through chess and cat we have just returned in a body, are to deliver over to me in nine months the hero of this book, I must show beforehand that I do not buy at random, but (to speak commercially) select my goods (i. e., my hero) from a very good house, or, to speak heraldically, from a very old one. For it must, for the benefit of the free knighthood, the feudal landlords and the patricians, be stated and proved here or nowhere, that the purveyor of my hero, Herr von Falkenberg, is of an older nobility than any of them; and, in fact, of an illegitimate one.

Namely, in the year 1625 occurred the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, on which occasion his great-grandfather was unusually intoxicated and nevertheless drew out from the pot of fortune a handful of something extraordinary, a second diploma of nobility. For there sat drinking with him, but seven times deeper, a clever horse jockey from Westphalia, who was also a Herr von Falkenberg, but only a namesake; their two family-trees did not graze nor anastomose with each other, either in roots, fibres, or in leaves. Although, now, the genealogical tree of the Westphalian was so old and had stood so long in the wind and weather of life, that it seemed to have shot up out of the earth simultaneously with many a veteran on Lebanon or Ætna; in short, although the horse-dealer was a man of sixty-four-fold scutcheon, whereas the great-grandfather, to his great shame and that of him who takes him into his romance, really counted as many teeth as ancestors, namely, thirty-two; still the thing could be brought about. That is to say, the old Westphalian was the sole support and concluding vignette and Hogarthian tail-piece of his whole historical picture-gallery; not even in the two Indies, where we all have and inherit our cousins, had he a single one. Upon this the great-grandfather planted himself, and sought to extort from him by curses and prayers his patent of nobility, in order to give it out as his own; "for who the devil will be the wiser?" said he; "it is of no use to you and I can tack it on to mine." Nay, the compiler of ancestors, the great-grandfather, offered to act as a Christian, and to give the dealer in horses and ancestors in exchange for the diploma an unnaturally beautiful stallion, such a grand sultan and connubial master of a neighboring equine harem as one had hardly seen matched. But the last of his line turned his head slowly to and fro, and said coldly, "I would rather not," and drank his Zerbot bottle-beer. When he had merely tried a couple of glasses of Quedlinburg Gose (a light colored beer), he began already to storm and curse at the very supposition, which began to look promising. When he had put down on the top of that some Calktuff from Konigsbutter, I think it was (for Falkenberg had a whole Meibomium de cerevisiis, [Meibom or malt liquors] namely, his beers, in his cellar), then he actually came out with some grounds for his refusal, and things grew very hopeful.

When at last he found how finely the Breslau Scheps foamed in the glass, or in his head, then he ordered the carcass of a miserable stallion to be led into the courtyard, and when he had seen him jump, it may have been two or three times, he gave the great-grandfather his hand and in it the 128 ancestors. Now, when great-grandfather Falkenberg had taken the purchased patent, which had been almost chewed to pieces by some ancestral generation of moths that had a thousand-fold scutcheon each, and, as it was porous as a butterfly's wing, had spread and stuck it with a plaster-knife on new parchment, first of all, however, covering it with bookbinders paste; then, as may easily be imagined, the parchment rendered his whole noble ancestry the same service of ennoblement which the stallion in Westphalia did to the equine posterity, and over a hundred buried men, in whom not a drop of blood was any longer to be ennobled, acquired at least noble bones. Therefore neither I nor any Canoness needs be ashamed of having as much intercourse with the future young Falkenberg as will hereafter occur. For the rest I should be glad if the anecdote went no further, and, in fact, to a reading-public of intelligence this needs hardly to be said.

The nuptial lupercalia, with their longest day and their shortest night, I have never undertaken to reproduce; but the introduction thereto I should be glad to describe. Only, as I unfortunately went to bed last night with the purpose this morning of transporting the nuptial and chess-playing couple with three strokes of the pen from the bridal to the marriage bed, which is nineteen leagues distant from it, namely in the knightly seat of the Falkenbergs in Auenthal--and as I quite naturally proposed to picture merely with three slight hints the little amount of ceremony, the little fifing, prancing, and powder, wherewith the good Auenthalers received their newly-married graces; accordingly all night the dream went up and down in my head that I was myself a home-returning Imperial Count and the Imperial Hereditary Casperl, and that my subjects, as they had not laid eyes on me for 15 years, almost shot me dead with joy. In my country there were naturally a thousand times more shouts of welcome and honneurs sent up than in the Falkenberg feudality; I will therefore omit the honors paid the Cavalry Captain and present merely my own.

FIRST EXTRA LEAF.

Manifestations of Honor Which Were Made to me by my County on my Return Home from the Grand Tour.

If a Count's subjects take from him his six nonnatural things[^[9]] I know not how they can give him a better reception. Now mine left me not a single non-natural thing.

First of all, they took away from me the most important unnatural thing, sleep. Having traveled or waded, as if I were big with child, from Chalons to Strasburg, only to thunder down from there at such a rate that I rather hopped than sate, so furiously as to knock down my runner--I would for the life of me have gladly flown round Flörzhübel (the first market town in my country) sleeping (and was not that easy to do in dream?); but just at the boundary and bridge, as I opened my eyes in going down hill and closed them in going up, I was fallen upon, not murderously, but musically, by a body of militia sixteen drunken men strong, who had been lying in wait here since seven in the morning with their musical trumpets and ear-breaking tools, in order at the right time to wound me and my horses in the ears with fife and drum. Fortunately the storming-artists had drummed all day long for fun and ennui more vigorously than they did afterwards in earnest and for love. During the whole march, while orchestra and barracks went along beside my horses, I was scolding myself for having, seventeen years before, qualified and graduated Flörzhübel to a city--"I don't mean merely" (I said to myself) "because afterward a Sovereign Rescript stripped Flörzhübel again of city-rights and its Gens d'Armurie of its accoutrements, or merely because we proposed to sell the superfluous equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me sleep, which is surely the first non-natural thing."

Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Flörzhübel, who had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted widow's half of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never have it to say of him, that among so many jus and bouillons, he had presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."

The third thing, combining both motion and rest, I came within a hair of losing through the triumphal arch of my place of burial, because it and the musical gallery upon it tumbled down close at the heels of my last servant, but to the joy of the country, harmed nothing belonging to any man, except the barber's cupping-glasses, which he had attached to the triumphal gate, projecting in such a manner as to have something hung upon them wherein was to be stuck the not bad illumination. I was going to be properly mad about the satirical cupping-vessels, which I was fain to take for satirical types and emblems of my Countly cupping of the full veins of my tenants and vassals, and I asked the Mayor whether he thought I was utterly devoid of wit; but they all in a body swore that in the whole getting up of the triumphal arch wit had not been once thought of.

Air, the fourth non-natural thing of an Imperial Hereditary Casperl, I might by this time have had; for not merely on account of the short misuse which the instruments and lungs of my vassals made of so glorious an element, should I have shut myself up and the sector of air around me so closely as I in fact did, into my carriage--that I must say expressly, so that the good Kelzheim Chorister may not imagine I was displeased because his musical fire-arm, his trumpet, from the double sound-hole of his belfry and his body, stuck out towards me to such an extent that the melodious air-waves from the two came to meet me four acres off, while below in the steeple his wife also milked the bells, as if I were being buried and receiving not so much a reception as a requiem--I say, not on account of the musical married pair would I have shut the carriage, but it was on account of the danger of life; for a joyous picket of peasants discharged at me out of seventeen fowling-pieces and two or three pocket-pistols, not only salvos, but a few ramrods into the bargain.

Now, when a Count sits there deprived of four nonnatural things, he may not venture to think of the fifth, of evacuation. The sphincter of every, even the greatest, pore remains closed, as well as the coach-door; no wonder then, that, as I could not say to a single pore--Ephphatha: be opened!--I started up crying "Deil a bit do I gain by my sitting on the bench of Counts at Ratisbon, if here I must squat on the coach-cushion and not be able to do anything, even."

Genuine Passion, which is the sixth non-natural thing of man, is stifled by nothing so easily as by a satin dog's-pillow, on which the parsons, schoolmasters and magistrates, whom an Imperial Hereditary Casperl has under him, deliver to him the Carmina which they have caused to be composed in his honor; for they can neither be laughed at nor wept over, nor scolded at nor spoken of.

My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first, namely, wakefulness; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by drumming and lighting fires keep off wild beasts from their bodies.

THIRD SECTION.

Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles

Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check was Gustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.

Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.

Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial, i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the Moravian Diminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.

But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[^[10]] and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.

Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profound earthly life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers, whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with admiration.

The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.

After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.

Such miserable circumstantialities as, e. g., the purveying of the wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very well--I say; he did not command, but simply accustomed and narrated. He never contradicted either himself or the child; nay, he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself. Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest, the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).

To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed; and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus, lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud, drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses and Blessed ones, of whom we shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type! As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around the little one this Orbis Pictus of good men, as the Almighty Genius builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the drawing before, but only after the description, because hearing attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing. Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of apprehending beautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords: nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.

And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes did not reach out beyond his acquisitions of knowledge, and neither a fear nor a murmur distracted his peaceful soul. The Genius was happy; for the execution of this ten years' building plan was easier for him than the resolving upon it; the resolution conjures up at once all difficulties and deprivations before the soul. But the execution puts them far asunder and gives us the first real interest in it through the peculiar pleasure without which, in a thousand things, one's patience would be exhausted--that of seeing something daily growing under one's hands.

For both of them it was a good thing that down below there in this moral forcing-house dwelt also a schoolmate of Gustavus's, who was at the same time a half collaborator and adjutant of the Genius, who, however, by reason of certain defects of his heart derived from the whole education but a slim advantage, although he, as well as Gustavus, belonged to the class of animals with two heart-chambers and with warm blood. If I say that the greatest fault of the fellow-laborer was, that he would not drink brandy, one sees plainly that he had to be, not like Gustavus, trained up, but trained down,[^[11]] because he was the neatest, blackest of--poodles that ever sprang round over the earth with a white breast. This intelligent dog and assistant teacher often relieved and released the head-master in play hours; besides, most of the virtues could be less well practised by him than by Gustavus upon him, and he kept for that purpose the necessary heteronymous vices ready:--in sleep the school-colleague easily snapped about him at living legs, in his waking hours at those which had been plucked off.

In this subterranean America, the three Antipodes had their day, i. e., a lamp lighted, when with us overhead it was night--their night, i. e., sleep, they had when with us the sun shone. The fair Genius had so arranged it on account of external noises and for the sake of his daily excursions. At that time, while his teacher enjoyed air and society, the little one lay down there in his monastery, with bandaged eyes, for chance and the cellar-door were not to be trusted. Sometimes he carried the sleeping veiled angel up into the fresh air and into the inspiring sunshine, as ants submit their larvæ to the brooding wings of the sun. Verily, were I a second or third Chodowiecky, I would at this moment stand up and engrave the scene for my own book in Swedish copper, not merely to depict how our pale red darling brought out into the open air slumbers under his bandage in a latticed rose-shadow, and like a dead angel lies before us in the infinite Temple of Nature, peacefully reposing with little dreams of his little cavern--there is something still more beautiful--thou still hast thy parents, Gustavus, and dost not see them; thy father, who stands beside thee, his eye bedimmed with love, and rejoices over the pure breathing that heaves thy little breast, and forgets in his joy at that how thou art being educated--and thy mother, who presses to thy face, on which lies the two-fold innocence of solitude and childhood, the love-hungering eyes which remain unsatisfied because they must not speak nor fondle. But she is pressing thee out of thy slumber, and thou must after a short time go down again to thy Plato's Cave.

The Genius had long been preparing him for the resurrection from his holy sepulchre. He said to him: "If thou art very good and not impatient, and lovest me and the poodle right well, then thou mayest die. When thou hast died, then I will die too, and we will go to heaven" (by which he meant the surface of the earth); "there it is right beautiful and magnificent. There they kindle no light in the day time, but one as large as my head stands in the air above thee and moves all day around thee beautifully--the roof of the great room is blue, and so high that no man can reach it with a thousand ladders--and the floor is soft and green, and, what is finer still, the poodles are there as large as our chamber. In heaven all is full of blessed ones, and there are all the good people, of whom I have so often told thee, and thy parents" (whose likenesses he had long since given him), "to whom thou art as dear as thou art to me, and who will give thee everything. But thou must be very good." "Ah! when, then, are we going, at last, to die?" said the little one, and his glowing fancy labored within him, and at every such description he ran up to a landscape painting and touched and interrogated every spear of grass.

Nothing acts so feebly upon children as a threat or a hope which is not fulfilled before evening. Only so long as one talks to them beforehand of a future examination or of their mature age, is it of any avail; hence many repeat this prefatory talk so often that it no longer leaves even a momentary impression. The Genius therefore constructed the long way to the greatest reward out of lesser ones, all which strengthened the impression and the certainty of the great one, and which will be found in the following section.

Apropos! I must repeat, that of all evils as regards education and children, in comparison with which the so much decried spelling-and-whipping-system is golden, there is none more poisonous, no more unwholesome mispickel, (or arsenical pyrite), and no more consuming pedagogical tape-worm than a French nurse.

FOURTH SECTION.

Lilies--Mountain Bugles--and an Outlook--are Signs of Death

In all the fibres of my memory (those reminder-threads and leaf-skeletons of so much miserable stuff), there rests no lovelier legend than this from the cloister of Corbey--that when the Angel of Death had to take away therefrom a spiritual brother, he laid, as a sign of his coming, a white lily in his pew. Would that I had this superstition! Our gentle Genius imitated the Death-angel and said to the little one: "When we find a lily we shall die soon after." How, after that, did the heaven-longing child, who had never seen a lily, seek everywhere to find one! Once, when his Genius had pictured to him the Genius of the Universe, not as a metaphysical Robinet's puzzle-image, but as the greatest and best man on earth; a fragrance never before present floated around it. The little child feels, but does not see; he stepped out into the cloister and--there lay three lilies. He does not know them, these white June-children; but the Genius, enraptured, takes them from him and says: "Those are lilies, they come from heaven; now we shall soon die." Long years after, the sight of a lily always revived the old thrill of emotion in Gustavus's heart, and surely one day in his actual death hour a lily will hover before him as the last gleaming quarter of the waning moon-earth.

The Genius proposed to himself to let him, on the first of June, his birthday, come up out of the earth. But by way of stimulating his soul to a higher (perhaps too high a) degree, he let him in the last week experience still two holy vigils of death. That is to say, as he had already pictured to him beforehand the blisses of heaven, i. e., of the earth, with voice and face, especially the glories of the heavenly and spheral music, so now he ended with the intelligence, that often even to dying men, who were not yet gone up, this echo of the human heart sounded down, and that they then died the sooner because those tones dissolved the tender heart. Into the ear of the little one, music, that poesy of the air, had never yet entered. His teacher had long since made a so-called death-song; in this Gustavus naturally referred everything it said of the second life to the first, and they read it often without singing it. But in the last week all at once for the first time the Genius began to transfigure his mild didactic voice into the still softer singing-voice of the Moravian choral music, and to deliver the yearning death-song to the accompaniment of a mountain-bugle--that flute of longing--which he had arranged to have blown overhead; and the long-drawn adagio wails penetrated to their ears and hearts through the muffling earth like a warm rain....

In Gustavus's eye stood the first tear of joy--his heart turned over--he believed, even now he was dying of the tones.

O music! Lingering echo from a remote world of harmony! Sigh of the angel within us! When the word is speechless, and the embrace and the eye, even the weeping one, and when our dumb hearts lie solitary behind the grating of the breast; O, then it is through thee alone they cry to each other in their prisons, and their distant sighs meet and mingle and cheer them in their wilderness!

As at a real death, so in this mimetic one, the Genius led his pupil's approach toward heaven on the step-ladder of the five senses. He invested the semblance of death, to the advantage of the reality, with all possible charms, and Gustavus will certainly die one day more rapturously than one of us. While others bring us to see hell open, he promised him, that, like a Stephen, on his dying day he should see heaven open already, even before he ascended into it. And this actually occurred. Their subterranean valley of Jehoshaphat had beside the afore-mentioned cellar stairs a long, horizontal cross-passage, opening at the foot of the mountain out into the valley and the village which lay therein, and barred up at certain intervals by two doors. In the night before the first of June, when only the white sickle of the moon hung in the horizon, and like an old visage gray with age, turned in the blue night toward the hidden sun, he had arranged that in the midst of a prayer these doors should imperceptibly be thrown open--and now, Gustavus, for the first time in thy life, and on thy knees, thou lookest out into the broad theatre, nine million square miles broad, of human doings and sufferings; but only just as we in the nightly years of childhood and under the veil wherewith a mother guarded us from the flies, so dost thou glance out into the sea of night which spreads out before thee into immensity with swinging blossoms and shooting fire-flies, that seem to move among the stars, and with the whole multitudinous movement of creation! O, thou happy Gustavus! this night-piece shall remain long years after in thy soul, as a green island that has gone down in the sea, it shall lie encamped behind deep shadows and look yearningly at thee as a long past joyous eternity.... But after a few minutes the Genius folded him in his arms and veiled the eager eyes in his bosom; imperceptibly the heavenly gates swung to again and snatched his spring-time away.

In twelve hours he will be standing in the midst of it; but I am already oppressed with suspense as I draw nearer and nearer to this mild resurrection. It moves me, not merely because only one single time in my life can I have such a birthday, worthy of heaven, as Gustavus's, rise and set in my soul, a day whose fire I feel in my pulse, and of which only a faint reflection falls upon this paper--nor yet merely for the reason that presently the Genius withdraws, unknown both to author and to reader; but chiefly on this account, that I am to cast my Gustavus out of the still diamond mine, where the diamond of his heart formed itself so transparent and so brilliant, and so without spot or flaw, into the hot world which will soon hold up to it its concave mirror and crumble it to pieces; from his dead calm of the passions out into the so-called heaven, where by the side of the saints walk fully as many of the reprobate. But as he will then be at liberty also to gaze upon the face of great nature, it is not, after all, his fate alone that makes me anxious, but mine and that of others, for I reflect through how much rubbish our teachers drag our inner man as a malefactor before he is permitted to stand upright! Ah, had a Pythagoras, instead of the Latin one and the Syrian History, let our heart become a softly trembling Æolian Harp, on which Nature should play and express her feelings, and not an alarming fire-drum of all passions--how far--since Genius, but never Virtue, has limits, and everything pure and good can grow still purer--might we not have risen!

Just as Gustavus waits over a night, so will I postpone my picture one night that I may give it to-morrow with full rapture of soul.

FIFTH SECTION.

Resurrection.

Four Priests stand in the broad cathedral of nature and pray at God's altars: the mountains:--the ice-gray Winter with his snow-white surplice--the in-gathering Autumn with sheaves under his arm, which he lays on God's altar that men may take them--the fiery youth, Summer, who toils till night in bringing his offerings--and, finally, the child-like Spring, with his white church decoration of lilies and blossoms, who, like a child, strews flowers and blossom-cups around the lofty spirit, and in whose prayer all that hear it join. And for the children of men Spring is surely the fairest priest.

This flower-priest was the first the little Gustavus beheld at the altar. Before sunrise on the first of June (down below it was evening) the Genius knelt down in silence and offered up with his eyes and mute, trembling lips a prayer for Gustavus, which spread out its wings over his whole untried life. A flute breathed out overhead a tender, loving call, and the Genius said: "It is calling us up out of the earth toward heaven; come with me, my Gustavus." The little one trembled for joy and fear. The flute sounds on. They go up the nocturnal passage of the Jacob's-ladder. Two anxious hearts almost crush with their beatings the breasts that hold them. The Genius pushes open the doors, behind which stands the world, and lifts his child out on to the earth and under the heavens.... And now the high waves of the living sea clap their hands together above Gustavus. With choking breath, with compressed eyelids, with overwhelmed soul, he stands before the illimitable face of nature, and clings trembling more and more closely to his Genius.... But when, after the first shock of amazement, he had flung open, torn open his soul to these streams; when he felt the thousand arms with which the lofty Soul of the Universe clasped him to itself; when he was able to see the green, tumultuous flowery life round about him, and the nodding lilies, which seemed to him more living than his, and when he feared he should tread the trembling flower to death; when his eye, cast upward again, sank in the depth of heaven, the opening of infinity; and when he shrank with apprehension of the breaking down of the dark red mountain piles moving along through the heavens and the lands floating over head; when he saw the mountains resting like new earths on ours; and when he witnessed the endless life stirring around him, the feathered life flying along with the cloud, the humming life at his feet, the golden, crawling life on all leaves, the live arms and heads of the giant trees all beckoning to him; and when the morning wind seemed to him the great breath of a coming Genius, and when the fluttering foliage whispered, and the apple tree threw upon his cheek a cold leaf; when, finally, his eye, moving heavily under its burden, let itself be borne on the white wings of a butterfly, which, soundless and solitary, balanced above gay flowers and hung like a silvery auricula[^[12]] to the broad green leaf.... then did the heavens begin to burn, the trailing edge of her mantle blazed off from the fleeing night, and on the rim of the earth, like a crown of God fallen from the divine throne, lay the Sun. "There stands God!" cried Gustavus; and with dazzled eye and mind, and with the greatest prayer which the bosom of a ten-year-old child ever conceived, he flung himself headlong upon the flowers....

Only open thy eyes again, thou darling! Thou art no longer gazing into the glowing globe of lava; thou art lying on the overshadowing breast of thy mother, and her loving heart in that bosom is thy Sun and thy God--for the first time thou seest the ineffably gracious, womanly and maternal smile, for the first time hearest the parental voice; for the first two blessed ones who came to meet thee in heaven are thy parents. O heavenly home! The sun beams, all dew-drops sparkle beneath it, eight tears of joy descend with the milder image of the sun, and four human beings stand blissful and touched with emotion on an earth which lies so far from heaven! Veiled Destiny! will our death be like that of Gustavus? Veiled destiny! that sittest behind our earth and behind a mask and lea vest us time to be--ah! when death dissolves us and a great Genius has lifted us out of the vault into heaven, then when its suns and joys overpower our soul, wilt thou give us also there a familiar human breast, on which we may open our feeble eyes? O Destiny! dost thou give us again, what here we can never forget? No eye will be directed to this page, which has nothing there to weep over and nothing there it yearns to meet again: ah, will it, after this life, full of dead ones, meet no well-known form, to which we can say: Welcome? ...

Fate stands dumb behind the mask; the human tear lies dark upon the grave; the sun shines not into the tear.--But in Immortality and before the face of God our loving heart dies not.

SIXTH SECTION.

Forcible Abduction of the Fair Face.--Important Portrait

The state of astonishment into which Gustavus had, all day long by one object after another, been wrought up, and the loss of sleep, ended his first heavenly day with a feverish evening, which he would have had to relieve by a gush of tears, even without any other reason. But he had one: his Genius had, during the tumult in the garden, been snatched away from the darling with a speechless kiss, and had left nothing behind but a leaf to the mother. That is, he had cut a leaf of note-paper into two halves; the one contained the dissonances of the melody and the questions of the text thereto, on the other stood the solutions and the answers. The dissonant half was to come into the hands of his Gustavus; the other he kept. "I and my friend," said he, "shall one day recognize each other thereby in the world's wilderness; in the fact, that he has questions, to which I have the answers." The poodle too, which was every day growing bigger, he took with him.... Where shall we see thee again, unknown, beautiful enthusiast? Thou art all unaware how thy orphaned pupil cries and sobs for thee, and how the new, star-studded heaven does not please him so much as his chamber-ceiling when thou wast with him, and how the lighted candles transform every apartment to the still cavern in which he had loved thee and thou him. Even so in life's evening we bend down over the graves of our early friends, whom no one mourns but we; till at length a strange youth buries the last old man out of the loving circle; but not a single soul remembers the fair, youthful days of the last old man!

In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes, and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every human being a bird Phœnix; every change in the heavens, every sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.

It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses, which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.

His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.

The wife of the Head-forester, von Knör, had brought a lot of Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister touched a wine-glass, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.

But now when for the benefit or so many spectators the wondrous creature was to come forth, behold! he was--gone. Every corner was dusted out, long-lost things were found, every place was screamed into, every nook and every bush--no Gustavus! The Captain, whose first stage of distress was always a kind of anger, let the whole expectant sisterhood sit there with eyes wide open; but the Captain's lady, whose distress took hold of tenderer parts of her nature, drew her seat close up to them for sympathy. But when all anxious, inquiring, running faces came back more and more disconsolate, and when they actually found behind the open castle-gate the plucked flowers which the little fellow had stuck into his little shaded bed, and which were still moist with his sprinkling, then were the faces of the parents darkened with despair. "Ah! the angel has plunged into the Rhine," said she, and he said nothing to the contrary. At another time he would have stamped such a non sequitur under foot, for the Rhine ran half a league from the castle; but here the reasoner in both was desperate anxiety, which makes far wider leaps than hope. I spoke just now of another time, therefore, because I know what the Captain's way usually was, namely, to be, from very compassion, excited against the sufferer himself. Never, for instance, did his look express a stronger curse against his wife than when she was sick (and a single swift globule of blood would upset her); she must not murmur in the least; and when that was obeyed, she must not sigh; that done, she must not even make a sorrowful face; and if she obeyed all these directions she must not, in fact, be sick. He had the folly of idle and genteel people, he would always be jolly.

But here, when for once his pot of luck lay in fragments, another's sigh sweetened his own and his wrath at the careless troop of servants and at the dry sheep and aftermath of the sisterhood.

When the child had stayed out all night and the whole of the next forenoon, and when they actually found his little hat in the woods on the carriage-road, then did the stings of anxiety grow into the festering pains of inflicted wounds. There is no agitation of the soul against which it is so hard to bring an effective argument as against anxiety: I have, therefore, for a year and a day ceased to attempt any; I just willingly admit the worst it urges and then simply assail the next inward emotion which may grow out of the apprehended worst with the question, "and what if it should come?"

Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodpecker scared away, in the effort to find a head for the hat, but in vain; and on the third day the Captain, whose face was an etching-plate of agony, wandered, without any distinct design of searching, so deeply into the woods that he would hardly have noticed the swift passing through the thicket of a traveling carriage, set out with trunks and servants, had not, issuing from it like a thunder-clap of gladness, the voice of his lost son startled his soul. He runs after it, the carriage shoots ahead, and out in the open ground he sees it already sending up a cloud of dust beyond his castle. Beside himself he comes up storming into the castle-yard to start in pursuit of it and--let it go. For up at the house-door stood the inmates of the castle who had suddenly run together and were now gathered in a knot around Gustavus, the castle dogs barked without having any clearly defined reason, and all were talking and questioning in such a way that one could not properly hear from the child a single answer. The carriage as it whirled by had let him out. On his neck hung by a black ribbon his portrait. His eyes were red and moist with the pangs of homesickness. He told of long, long houses, which he took streets to be, and of his little sister who had played with him, and of his new hat; but no soul would have been the wiser for all this had not the cook spied a card which had fallen at his feet. This the Captain read, and saw that he was not to read it, but his wife. He deciphered and translated it out of the Italian and the female handwriting thus:

"Can a mother, then, excuse herself to a mother, for having so long kept her child from her? Even if you do not forgive me my fault, still I cannot repent it. I found your dear little one three days ago wandering about in the woods, where I stole him into my carriage, in order to save him from worse thieves, and to find out his parents. Ah, I will just confess it to you: I should have taken him with me, even without either of these excuses. O, not because of his heavenly beauty, but because he looks so perfectly like, even to his hair, my dear, lost Guido; I can, even now, hardly give him up. Ah, it is already many years since fate in a strange manner snatched my dearest child, living, out of my bosom. Yours comes back to-day--mine, never!--Pardon the neck-pendant. The portrait you will take to be his, so like is he to my son: but it is really that of my Guido. His own I had also painted for me, and keep it, in order to have a duplicate image of my good child. Should I one day come to see your Gustavus, in his full bloom, I should gaze long upon him; I should say to myself: so must my Guido be now looking; so much innocence will he, too, have in his eyes; so very pleasing will he, also, be.--Ah, my little daughter weeps that her playmate is to leave her--and I do too; she gives back only a brother: but I, a son. May you and he be happier!--Excuse me from giving my name."

They all fell to guessing who the authoress could be. The Captain alone looked sad, and said nothing. I know not whether from sorrow at the recollection of his first lost son, or because he thought as I, in fact, do about the whole affair. I conjecture, namely, that the lost Guido is just his own child; and the correspondent is the beloved whom the commercial agent Röper had wrested out of his hands. I shall give my reason, by and by. Gustavus's beauty may be demonstrated, either a priori (by reasoning downward from cause to effect) or, secondly, by a reverse process, from consequent to antecedent. His forcing-house, in which he was trained and hidden, very naturally bleached his lily-skin to a white ground on which two pale cheek-roses, or only their reflection and the darker and denser rosebud of the upper lip had lighted. His eye was the open heaven which you happen upon in a thousand cases of five-year-old children, and only in ten of people fifty years old; and this eye was, moreover, veiled or beautified by long eye-lashes, and by a somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic haze. Finally, neither exertion nor passion had struck their marking-axe and its sharp letters into this fair tree, nor had the death sentence which was to announce its fall, been cut into its bark. But all beauty is soft, hence, the fairest people are the most tranquil; hence, violent labor distorts poor children and poor races.

But the year has not yet come, in which I can prove the beauty of Gustavus by the a posteriori process.

For as the auctioneer was at that time my most intimate friend, he executed for my pleasure the little trick of setting up for sale the paintings and engravings precisely on a day, when, on account of the masquerade, not a soul of the great world of Unterscheerau came out to the auction, I, alone, excepted; as expiatory payment for the same, I had to endure a thousand things. The whole town and suburb had contributed to this rubbish-heap of furniture, and was seller and buyer at once. In this auction appeared all European potentates, but wretchedly drawn and colored; and a nobleman of bon sens set up his two parents and was fain to pass them off as good knee-pieces (or half-length portraits);--in Rome, inversely, parents sold their children, only in naturâ. The nobleman hoped I would bid on his papa and mamma; but I overbade on nothing, except the portrait of Gustavus, which was knocked off to me. The nobleman was named Röper, of whom I have mentioned above, that he on one and the same day became husband and step-father.

And here, verily, thou hangest, Gustavus, opposite me and my writing-table, and when I am thinking upon anything, my eye always falls upon thee. Many blame me, my little hero, that I have nailed thee up here between Shakespeare and Winkelmann (by Bause); but hast thou not--a thing few think of--an arched nose, on which rest high and weighty thoughts; such a one as under the hand of death is often bent more beautifully; and hast thou not under the bony architrave a broad eye through which as through a triumphal gate nature enters into the soul, and a dome-crowned house of the spirit, and all else that entitles and enables thee to hold up thy head beside thy copper-plate neighbors?

The reader ought to know (but it occurs farther on) what obliges me just now, suddenly to finish and close the present sector.

SECOND EXTRA LEAF.

Straw Wreath Discourse of a Consistorial Secretary, Wherein he and it prove that Adultery and Divorce are Allowable

I confess here, our enlightened age should be named an adulterous generation. I certainly said once at the marketplace in Marseilles, that I held the miserable thing, matrimonial infidelity, to be right. Even long before I got to Munich, I said one ought to annex to the Metropolitan Church, of the marriage bed, a chapel of ease--in Upper Saxony I said, if that countess went on bearing for a whole year something daily: then with countesses even now, at least the foregone year were to be had--in the ten German circles I certainly expressed myself in ten different ways:--But it was not then in place anywhere to expound the matter clearly out of physiology, but only here.

It was Sanctorius[^[13]] who seated himself upon a Delphic night stool and there sat out the truth, that man got himself clothed upon every eleven years with a new body--the old one, like the German body politic, wearing away piece by piece till there remains of the whole mummy not so much as an apothecary will give, shaved down minutely, in a tea-spoon. Bernouilli contradicted Sanctorius up and down and showed us that he had blundered, for not in eleven, but in three years, the one of the twin brothers evaporated and the other crystallized. In short French and Russians change body oftener than the shirt on the body, and a Province is getting new bodies and a new religious Provincial jointly in three years as aforesaid.

The matter is by no means indifferent. For it is accordingly impossible that a baldhead, who celebrated his marriage jubilee should point to a bit of skin on his whole body as big as a penny and remark: "With this scrap of skin I stood 25 years ago at the altar and was, together with the rest, coupled to my jubilant wife here." That the jubilee-king cannot possibly do. The marriage ring, to be sure, has not dropped off, but the ring finger which it encircled has, long ago. In fact it is a trick beyond all tricks, and I appeal to other Consistorial secretaries. For the poor bride goes up joyfully under the bed canopy with the statua curulis of a bodily bridegroom and thinks--what knows she of good physiology?--that she has in the body something solid, a piece of iron, an article of real estate, in short a head with hairs, of which she can one day say, they have grown gray on mine and on my cap! Such is her hope; meanwhile in the midst of her hoping the rogue of a body works off its whole set of members, as a student his pawned student's goods, in the course of three years, in infinitesimal particles in mist and darkness. If she turns round on New Year's Eve--there lies in the marriage bed beside her a mere wax cast or second edition which the former body has left of itself, and in which there remains no longer a single leaf of the old one. What now--when the cubic contents of the bridal bed and of the marriage bed are so different--is a wife to think of the whole matter! I mean, if, e. g., a whole female consisting of (e. g. the Lady Consistorial President, the lady Vice-President, the lady Consistorial Secretary) after three years finds upon the pillow an entirely different male Consistory, from what the marriage promised this dissolved one should be: what course is a woman to take, who, if she is a consistorial half, knows right well quid juris? She, I say, who must have heard a hundred times over at the dinner table, that such an absconding of the male body is a cursed malicious abandonment or desertio malitiosa, which entirely releases her from her marriage vows--and in fact such a straw widow may actually have read Luther de causis matrimonii and have inferred therefrom that he does not forbid a maliciously deserted wife after a year or half a year to contract a new marriage. To betake herself to the aforesaid new marriage will manifestly be the first duty and design of such a deserted one; but as the new extant body of a husband cannot help the evaporation of its predecessor, accordingly, rather than distress him, she will do it without his knowledge and without vindictive feeling--perhaps when he is at the Exchange--or in the pulpit--or at the fair--or on board ship--or behind the session table or abroad somewhere.

Meanwhile the husband is no fool, but has always enough of physiology about him to know that the wife also changes her body as often as her maids; consequently he needs not to watch any chance. Nov. 22 c.25 of itself hands him the right of divorce, if she has run away from him for a night; but here the Consistorial Counselloress has absolutely blown away for ever and moreover repeats this evaporation every three years--she, who, nevertheless, according to "Lange's Clerical Rights," which the Consistorial Counsellor has on his book-shelf, would be obliged to follow him, if he were banished the country, even though, in the marriage-contract she had reserved the right to stay at home. Thus speaks Lange to husbands on the point. In the great world, where true chastity and universal knowledge, including of course physiology, are at home, the point has long since been treated with intelligence and propriety, and conscientiousness has been carried to great length. For as, in that sphere, a husband three years after the wedding-feast no longer expects to find in his spouse an apothecary's ounce of blood, nor a thin vein in which it ran, remaining of the old one; as, therefore, he thinks to find again the emigrated parts of his good lady much sooner and more surely in any other than in herself; as, accordingly, he must, much rather, regard love for his partner as infidelity to her and with her--(and, strictly taken, it is even so)--: it follows now, that the question is mainly one of pure morality; he, therefore, leaves to that assemblage of veins, nervous ganglia, finger-nails and nobler parts, which one calls in toto his wife--leaves her (or it) his name, half his credit, and half his children, because, on the whole, in the great world, one does not like publicly to dissolve public connections, and prefers, at last, to walk in a thousand air-woven fetters; but this his respect for morality and public sentiment does not allow him, to have one and the same dwelling--table--society with a wife who has another body; he does not even (which, perhaps, is being too scrupulous) like to appear with her in public and refrains at least in his house from all that of which he or Origen made themselves incapable.

There are miserable, faded pulpits, which may object to my position, that the wedded souls remain when the bodies have evaporated. For with the soul (therefore with the memory, the thinking faculty, the moral principle, etc.), at the present day there is little or no union in wedlock, but only with that which hangs round it. Secondly, it may be learned of any materialist on the philosophic exchange, that the soul is nothing but a sucker of the body, which, therefore, with both man and wife, passes away simultaneously with the body. One need not, however, take that ground, but one need only concur with Hume, who writes that there is no such thing as a soul, but merely a collection of ideas that cling together like toads'-spawn and so creep through the brain and think themselves. Under such circumstances the bridal pair may thank God, if their pair of coupled souls will hold together only as long as the two pairs of dancing-pumps at the marriage-ball. One sees this too the forenoon after the honeymoon.

Therefore, as has been said, no Canonist can put off the week in which man and wife may lawfully proceed to breach of marriage vows, longer than to the fourth year after betrothal; only for people of the world and of standing, this is hard and too rigorous, especially if they know from their "Keil" (the anatomist) that in a year the old body has entirely thawed away--a miserable sixteen pound avoirdupois alone excepted. Hence, it has often been my idea, that if I should bring my breach of marriage into the very first year (as many do) I should really be unfaithful to only a few pounds of my consort, (who weighs 107)--namely the sixteen pounds that still remained.

On the same exchange of bodies whereon one grounds his breach of marriage vows, must the Consistory ground its rule of divorce. For, as people often remain together, in open wedlock, nine, eighteen years after marriage, whereas all physiologists know that there are two new married bodies in the case, and without priestly consecration, accordingly the Consistory is now bound to look into it and interfere and divorce the two foreign bodies by a decree or two. Hence one will never hear of a conscientious Consistory's making any difficulty in separating Christians who are already joined in wedlock; but on the other hand one will quite as seldom hear of a case in which it divorces those who have merely promised marriage, without the greatest difficulty; and very naturally; for in the former case, that of a long marriage, true infidelity is to be averted by the bill of divorcement, because there are uncoupled bodies; but here, in the case of betrothal, the bodies which have made the engagement are not yet fully present, and they must first live for a long time in wedlock, before they are ripe for divorce. This is the true solution of an apparent contradiction, which has already misled so many weak minds to regard us all in Consistory as greedy of perquisites, and me as the marker, and our green session-boards as green billiard tables, around which President and Councillors skip with long queues, to play out our games; ah! besides, a Consistorial committee cuts more pens than coins money.

Why, on the whole, do not the Pastors report to us every couple in their parishes that have cohabited over three years, that they may be divorced at the proper time? Such a divorce, for which no further grounds are needed than this, that the two people have lived together a great while, has, indeed, in all countries no other design than that of allowing them to be afterward reunited regularly with their renewed bodies. The Consistory and I fare most accursedly in the matter, if things are not somewhat mended, when the new minister mounts the throne. Verily, such a spiritual administrative college often applies the long saw, and saws the marriage blocks or beds, in which the wedded pairs had lain for twenty-one years, who in so long a time had been seven times at least (infidelity and divorce falling due every three years) been proper subjects for infidelity and divorce; what forfeiture of perquisites, since we must needs multiply four-fold the costs of divorce, which we might have multiplied seven-fold! Besides such liquidation of divorce-expenses amounts to little, because it is notoriously moderated and, in fact, by the Consistory itself. Besides, one practises in the Consistorial Chamber the forethought and afterthought, by which I always, after fifteen or twenty years, draw out again the bill of perquisites, which the divorced pair had already paid, and hand it anew to the Consistorial messenger and collector, not so much for the purpose of getting the fees twice over (which is a secondary matter) as to duplicate the receipt, in case the divorced couple should have lost the first, and also to guard them against a third payment. One would make everything easy for the couple, by allowing the payment to be made in several and small installments.

... And to-day is three years since I too was joined in marriage.... but the straw-wreath oration on that occasion was too poor to repeat....

SEVENTH SECTION.

Robisch.--The Starling.--A Lamb in the Place of the Above-Mentioned Cat

After such an abduction they confined Gustavus's theatre and pleasure-ground strictly within the wall of the castle; into the waving grain-fields and the hamlet of Auenthal, which lay at about a seventeenth of a German mile distant, he could only look. This flowery mountain island he cruised round all day long, in order to knock down every red chafer, to twist off every marbled snail-house from its leaf, and generally to shut up everything that skipped about on six feet in the prison he had prepared for it. At the expense of his inexperienced fingers, he even undertook at first to pull the bee by the hinder part of the body out of its cup of joy. The motley prisoners he now crowded together (as princes do all classes of men into one metropolis) into a beautiful Solomon's-temple, or into a silver-plated Noah's-ark of pasteboard, with more windows than walls. The architect of this fourth temple of Solomon was not, as with the first, the Devil or the Worm Lis,[^[14]] but a human being, who could easily be likened to both, the so-called princely rat-catcher Robisch. This vassal of the Captain visited annually the best chambers and gardens of the whole land, in order to cleanse both, not so much of their worst as of their least inmates--mice and moles. I will not exactly assure the learned Republic that this mouse-butcher dispatched as many subterranean moles out of the world as there are scribbling ones that annually come in, to set themselves on their hind feet and then with their fore feet, which in both kinds of moles resemble human hands, in the book stores and at the Leipsic trade-sale, throw up their mole-hills as little Parnassus-mountains;--meanwhile, Robisch was paid exactly as if the chamber-hunter had cleared out all vermin. For the people thought, if one should provoke this cup-poisoner of the rodents, instead of paying him, he would imitate the miracles of Moses, and redouble, by colonies left behind him, the vermin which one took out of his royal and penal jurisdiction. I will take my hands off from this dirty soul, whose orbit, I hope, may never bring him nearer my Gustavus, when I have recorded that he was often in the house of the Falkenbergs; that, when there were strangers there, he acted as extra and occasional domestic, and when wild game, in the shape of recruits, was to be caught, as drawing-hound to the Captain, and that he pressed himself and his wares upon little Gustavus. Such a hooking-on to children, without parental childlikeness, is ambiguous. Children, however, have a special love for servants, and Gustavus particularly, who, indeed, could not, even at a later period, possibly hate any one whom he had loved in his childhood; all the misdeeds which Robisch might have committed against him could not have snapped asunder the bond of that gratitude he felt for the gift of the miserable insect block-house which depopulated the wall.

Whatever lived and buzzed in the Solomon's-castle-church must be fed with sugar, because children look upon that as both lunch and dessert; and the finest inmates would have starved to death had not their overseer, Gustavus, received from the chamber-hunter, as a further present, a starling; for this starling he let hop into the Pantheon, and eat everything which itself had nothing to eat.... If I have here hid away under the wing-sheaths of the insects, and in the bill of the starling the most just reflections and the boldest hints, I hope the reader will cleverly find them there.

Except myself, no one, perhaps, had Gustavus's name in his bill so often as the starling, who, like court people, never had anything in his head but a nomen proprium. The little fellow thought the starling thought, and was a man as much as Robisch, and loved him for all he did; therefore, he could not be satisfied with listening to him and loving everything about him. In fact, there was nothing which he could love and hug enough. The farmer had for that purpose given him for a companion a black lamb, which he led and lured around the wall with a red ribbon and a crust of bread. The lamb, like a village comedian, had to play all parts. At one time he must be the Genius, then the poodle; now Gustavus and now Robisch. Thus did our little friend play solo his first earthly parts, and was at once manager, prompter, and theatre poet. Such comedies as children make for themselves are a thousand times more profitable than those they act, even though they came out of Weisse's writing-desk; in our day, besides, when the whole man is a figurant, his virtue a dramatic part, and his sensibility lyric poetry, this wrenching of children's souls is particularly dangerous. However, this is also, sometimes, not true; for I, myself, acted the complete sharper, to be sure only once, twice, or thrice in my life, but that was even before I had gone to my first confession.

The decree which forbade his going down the castle hill, differed honorably from the decrees of our transcendant parents, the magistracy, in this respect, that it was, in the first place, made known to the party concerned, and, secondly, that it was maintained for at least a fortnight. Gustavus would have given his life to have taken himself and his lamb from the wall down to the foot of the mountain. Now, as the Captain knew, from Quistorp's Juridical Contributions, that one may substitute for close confinement within the walls, the larger one of gaol limits, or the bounds of the district, accordingly he dictated the latter punishment instead of the former, and said: "Can not one give the lamb in charge of the farmer's Regel (Regina), so long as she tends the flock on the hillside? So far as I am concerned, the youngster may join in driving, if I only have him always in sight." I must still wait to see what the Imperial Knighthood will say or write upon this, viz., that an honorary member thereof, my hero, at four o'clock in the afternoon regularly twisted off a long hazel wand, and therewith transformed himself into a young ox-driver, and by the side of Strössner's eleven-year-old Regina, drove out the sheep and cattle and the lamb led by the ribbon with such pride and such Jupiter's eyebrows, that any one could easily see he directed the whole stall, and challenged the imperial chivalry at this moment to come and see him.

Only in the Millenial Kingdom are there such afternoons as Gustavus enjoyed, as in the lap of the earth, on that eminence. My father should have sent me to a drawing school: could I not now have caught and mirrored the whole landscape in my stream of colors instead of a stream of ink? Verily, I could image before the eyes of the reader every bush with its bird gliding into it, every lip-colored strawberry of the rocky slope, every sheep with its new growth of down, and every tree around whose roots the squirrel had strewed his crumbled fir-cones. Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, things at which the pole-cat hairs of the pencil brush in vain, but which flow beautifully from my quill--the eye of Gustavus swimming on the tide of pleasure, sails lightly to and fro between the lamb, the bright flowery ground with the shadow-formed spit of land and the enchanting face of Regina, and needs never to look away.

Why did I say "enchanting face," when it was only an every-day one? Because my little Apollo and sheepherd with thirsty eyes flew to this face, as to a flower. In a brain like his, wherein all day long the white flame of fancy and no blue phlegmatic brandy-flame blazed up, it could not fail that every female face should shine with gilded charms in a divine color, and not in a hue of death. All beauties had with him the advantage, too, of having been seen, not for ten years, but within ten days. This, however, is not his first love, but only a morning-divine-service, a vigil eve, a Protevangelium of some first love or other--nothing more.

For two whole weeks he drove his lamb to pasture, before his courage rose so high that he could venture--not to seat himself beside her knitting (that exceeded his human powers), but--to hold fast his sheep to its postillion d'amour, not, however, to lead it to Regina, but to be drawn by it himself to her; for the best love is the most bashful, as the basest is the most bold. Then, like a tranquillizing moon, would her image, as she was more in his thoughts than in his sight, lay itself upon his dreaming soul, and so much was enough. His second contrivance for being her assessor (or by-sitter) was the round shadow of a linden-tree that waved lower down the hill, behind which, as behind a lattice, the evening sun was broken into splinters. With this shadow he now edged up nearer and nearer to Regina; under the pretext of shunning one sun, he drew nearer to another redder one. With such little trickeries love runs over; but they are all guessed and forgiven; and they are often prompted more by instinct than by conscious design. To be sure, when the evening slowly stretched upward from the valley to the heights--when drowsy nature, sinking to slumber, still, as if half in sleep, murmured a word or two in the broken tones of a bird that had gone to its nest--when the chime of bells on the necks of the herd, that plucked the innocent flowers of joy from the meadow, and the monotone of the cuckoo and the confused hum of dying day had pressed the keys of the lowest strings; then did his love and his courage grow wonderfully, and not seldom to such a pitch that he openly took out of his pocket the cake which he had kept for her, and, without scruple, laid it in the grass, in order actually to make her a tender of this pastry, so soon as they should have, in the twilight, to part from each other at the castle-gate: there he thrust the donation upon her with hurried confusion and darted away with joyful shame. If he succeeded in insinuating into her hand this evening offering, then was every pulse of his arterial system a rapturously beating heart (for the speech and joy of his love was giving), and under his bed-clothes he was all night planting bold plans for the morrow, which the afternoon bell-hammer with four blows killed utterly down to their very tap-roots. She always put on her mother's wide neckerchief; from this a philosopher of sense must infer that in after years the large neckerchiefs of the ladies pleased him, which I myself prefer to the former short aprons of the neck; on the same ground he, like myself, also liked broad head-bands and broad aprons. I have already played L'Hombre with philosophers, who reversed the thing and asserted that all this pleased him, not because the article was on the beauty (Regina), but because the beauty was in the article.

In fact, I am ashamed that, while the raggedest Baccalaurei dip their pens and portray to their fellow Baccalaurei the most elegant Sponsalia of Queens and Marchionesses, I meanwhile spend my writing materials on the sheep-tending and love-making of two children. Both occupations ran on into the autumn, and fain would I picture them; but, as I said, my shame before the Bachelors!--and yet how I envy thee, winsome dreamer, this white sunny side of thy life on thy mountain, and thy lamb and thy vision! And how gladly would I arrest the days that glide over thy head and load thy little lap with flowers, and bring them to a standstill, so that the funeral-train of the armed days should have to halt in the background, which may empty thy lap--let the gairish light into thy pleasure-grove--stab thy lamb--pay thy Regina the wages of a serving-maid!

But in October all go off to Unter-Scheerau; and the children do not even know, as yet, that there are such things as lips and kisses!

O weeks of the very first love! why do we despise you more than our later follies? Ah, on all your seven days, which in you look like seven minutes, we were innocent, unselfish and full of love. Beautiful weeks! ye are butterflies that have lived over from an unknown year[^[15]] to flutter as heralds of our life's spring-time! Would that I could think of you as enthusiastically as once, of you, days when neither pleasure nor hope were checked by any limits! Thou poor son of humanity--when the tender, white mist of thy childhood which spreads its enchantment over all nature is gone, still thou dost remain long in thy sunlight, but the fallen mist creeps up again from below into the blue as a denser rain-cloud, and in the noon of youth thou standest under the lightnings and thunder-bolts of thy passions!--and at evening thy rent heavens still rain on!

EIGHTH SECTION.

Departure for the City.--Woman's Whims.--Gashed Eyes

As the nobility and wood-rats inhabit the country in summer, and in winter the city, the Captain did so too; for the beauty of nature (he thought, and so did his lawyer) amounted at last to nothing more than an inventory of boors, whose elbows and thighs are cased half in ticking and half in stitched leather, swampy grounds, fallow fields, and herds of swine, and that there is nothing there for the senses but stench; whereas in the city there is at least a bit of flesh to be had, a game of French cards, some real good fun and a human being or two. It is youthful intolerance to deny that a man who has no feeling for music or scenery, may still have some for other people's needs and honor, especially if that man is the Captain.

Much weightier reasons still drove him to Scheerau; he sought there 13,000 Rixdollars, a lot of recruits, and a tutor. The last first! His wife said: "Gustavus must have some one; he is still deficient in breeding!" But tutors are not wanting in that; these infants from the Alumneum, whom nothing raises but a pulpit staircase, who continue to be shepherds of the soul to the young noblemen, till they become spiritual shepherds of the Church, which their pupil governs--these educational potters are able to shape and smooth not merely the mind of the young gentleman--as the father hopes--but his body also--as the mother hopes--right well; first, without any polish of their own; secondly, in study hours; thirdly, with words; fourthly, without women; fifthly, in a sixth way, this, namely, that the tutor compresses the broadest lion-heart into a sleepy badger's heart.

The second metallic spur which urged the Captain to the city was money. No one could fall into the condition of being either a creditor or a debtor so easily as he; as he neither denied himself nor others anything; he had at last transformed half the neighborhood into his guests and debtors; but now he would almost change himself into both, unless the Prince should build up again his dwindling money-pile. He was obliged therefore to come to the residence-city of Ober-Scheerau with the disagreeable petition that the aforesaid Prince would--not so much present or lend--that might have been practicable--but rather pay 13,000 Rixdollars, as a capital of seven years standing. The Sufi of Scheerau had, namely, a habit of never dismissing a mistress without giving her a parting present of an estate, or a government, or a starred husband; he always left so much of a female favorite, that a marriageable wife might be made out of it for a marrying ninny; as the eagle and the lion (who are also Princes, of beasts) always leave a portion of their prey unconsumed for other creatures. Accordingly he divorced himself even from the mother of his natural son--Captain von Ottomar--on the knightly seat, Ruhestadt, which he, on one and the same day, bought and gave away (with Falkenberg's money.)

Thirdly, the Captain, by coming to Scheerau, would spare his under-officers, who were mostly stationed there, a step or two; for he could strike, indeed, with his cane as easily as a lady with her fan, but he would not willingly break the sixth leg of a grasshopper, and therefore he spared the limbs of his people, who had four legs less, so much the more.

At last they are packing up, the Falkenberg family; we will look on. As the only time that Falkenberg's soul, like clocks and horses, did not stop was in traveling, on the morning of his journey he was in his most joyous and impetuous mood; wanted to go ahead not by seconds, but by nones; cursed all hands and feet in the castle for not flying; crammed and jammed the female trinkets and toggery with brazen hands into the nearest box; and had no other seton to draw off his impatient ennui than his feet, with which he stamped, and his hands, with which he partly thrashed the coachman for the same reason that he did the horses, and partly and handsomely, distributed presents to all that were left behind in the castle.

But the Captain's lady understood so well how to do all things in the most complete and judicious manner, that she was never done with anything. If she had had three jumps to take to get out of the way of the moon as it came dumping down to the earth, she would, before jumping have smoothed one more wrinkle out of the window curtain--if she had been ironing it would have been still worse. Like scholars, in addition to her professional or livelihood-study, she devotes herself to an extra-study and by-work and does, in connection with every piece of work, those that lie adjacent to it. "Once for all, I cannot be so slovenly as other women," she has just been saying to her gnashing husband, who looked upon her for eight dumb minutes. "I would rather, in the devil's name, you were the most slovenly in the whole feudal nobility," he replied. Now as she, whenever she was overtaken by a storm and injustice, merely anchored to the angry hyperboles of the party, as I, in the capacity of appellant advocate must frequently do, so too, on this occasion, she cleverly proved that slovenly women did not amount to much--and as there is nothing which still more excites a heated Captain like a haughty proof of what he does not in the least deny; so now, as always, things went on from worse to worse; the war-flails of the tongue were set in motion, his saliva-glands, her lachrymal-glands, and the livers of both parties with their gall-bladders secreted as much as must needs be secreted in Christian connubial colloquies,--but fifteen minutes and fifteen packings absorbed again like blood-veins all these connubial secretions. In starting on a journey no mortal has time to be angry. She was, upon my honor, a right good wife, only not at all times, e. g., least of all in setting out on a journey: she wanted, in the first place, to stay at home, and scolded at everything that had ears; secondly, she wanted to go. Never, when her husband in the morning put on his own cravat and his dog's, to make visits, did she desire to go too (unless indeed she had foreseen the absolute impossibility of going with them), but if, on the second day after, he happened to drop a word about a lady he had met there, then she would bewail her distress in his ears: "One of us cannot, the whole summer long, get a whiff of air out of the house." If, the next time he would constrain her to accompany him, then there was a frightful deal to do; there was bleaching, weeding, screwing up meat-chests and napkin-presses, washing-bills, and everything to attend to, or this pretext: "I prefer to stay with my little ones." But her aim, which few guessed, was merely to be in two places at once, in the house and out of it, and it is unfortunate for our wives, if our philosophers and husbands have not as much insight as the Catholic philosophers and husbands the Combrian, Ariaga, Bekanus had long ago,[^[16]] who perceived that the same body could easily at the same second not only sit, speak, grow in two or more places at once, but could even feel in one city and think in another,--at one and the same moment laugh in the church and weep in the theatre.

EXTRA-LEAF.

Are Women Female Popes?

All the questions in this paper I once put to an Abbess, who cared more to make money than saints. Is not the triple crown of the Pope now on female heads, as a four or five-fold one, and do not their hats shoot up into the air like lettuce-heads in dog-days?--Is it not well known to women themselves that they are as infallible as the Pope, and if he, as the Jansenists believe, is more so in dogmatic than in historical matters, is not with the female Popes the reverse true? And who has the courage to contradict one, unless he has married her? The Pope is God's vicegerent or, in fact, God himself, if Felius[^[17]] is to be credited; but are not the Papesses notoriously Goddesses? Certainly a Pope, Clement VI. himself says, that he can command angels to transport any church out of Purgatory into Heaven[^[18]]; but do our female Popes need angels for that? They require only a week to cast us into Purgatory, and only an hour to snatch us out of it into Heaven. Marianus Socinus, who asserts[^[19]] that a Pope can make something out of nothing, right out of wrong, and anything under heaven out of anything under heaven, must simply not think of doubting that our Papesses also have the same power, and do not their auricular confessions recur to is recollection? Who excommunicate their heretics or give dispensations to their faithful oftener. Popes or Papesses? and who, at this day, most serene Abbess! makes more omnipotent eye-briefs and lip-bulls, who creates more saints, more blessed ones and more Nuncios a and de latere, Peter's successors or Peter's successoresses? Popes are said formerly to have given away or taken away kingdoms; what then? Do not Papesses rule those Kingdoms? Popes could not bestow upon America anything except a name, but is not that which some Papesses bring us from that land something much more real? Kings who once were tormented by Popes, are now blessed by Papesses; and if the former at most created a King or two, are not the Kings under most of the European throne canopies made by Papesses, and in fact, in neat pocket-form, until they gradually grow up from the baptismal font to be as tall as I or their throne? Do we not kiss their slippers oftener than that of the Holy Father, since their two arms were found by Professor Moskati at Padua long ago to be two fore-feet, to whose kid or silk shoes (hand-shoes) we every week press our lips? Do not Pope and Papess lay aside their old names, when they ascend the throne, which the one claims on the ground of age, the other on that of youth? And if it were true, that Pope and Papess were originally only bishops of a Province (a husband) and that there has never been any other female Pope than the good Joan; could I venture to say the exact opposite publicly in an extra-leaf or privately in your ear, most serene Abbess?

End of the Extra-Leaf.

* * * *

CONTINUATION OF THE FOREGOING SECTION.

While I was questioning the Abbess, my attention was drawn away from the extravagantly whimsical Captain's lady. I will suppose that I or the reader had married her; then we should certainly have thanked heaven that we had screwed our brilliant ring on her ring-finger; and yet, as one sees, we should have had every day to have a tussle with her; so true it remains, that not the vices, but the whims of women strew so much horse-dust and so many thorns in the nuptial couch, that oftentimes Satan would be glad to lie there.

But for Gustavus, who carried so much, we should not have got out of the Castle ten minutes ago. My reader pictures him to himself, quite contrary to my expectation, and very falsely, namely, as being sad, because he has quitted the earthly cradle of his childhood, his garden of Adam and his evening mountain. How false! Another reader would imagine him full of joy, because with children, to whom every change of scene presents a new one, journeying is the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, and because the fancies of a child are not as yet gloomy ones. Scheerau must have seemed to his anticipation nothing less than the city with long houses, wherein he had played with his sister. Besides--which is a naturalization-act to all children--his play-house had been put on board; even the starling, who, as an agitated hierarch, sprang up and down in the Solomon's-Chapel-of-Ease, he held in his jouncing lap. He pitied every corner of the Castle with all that was in it, that it could not take passage with him; this whole shell of a house seemed to him so narrow, so worn out, so faded out! People who have traveled little look upon their familiar home at the moment of departure, at that of arrival, and at other times, with three different feelings; but for migrating locusts and birds of passage the high roads and city streets are only the corridors between the apartments.

Half an hour before starting he seated himself on the empty coach-box, with his legs wedged in among the baggage and in palpitating expectation of the moment when the horses should make their first leap. At last the carriage door was shut to and all rolled away, down the mountain, across the common, on which the white, peeled tree that was once more to be planted in the earth with red-painted flag and ribbon streamers for the church-wake, grew quite despicable in the eyes of Gustavus, who was just going to meet in Scheerau a hundred finer May-poles and church fairs. But as he passed along by the fruitful region of his mountain, where such a harvest of joys had ripened for him: Ah, then, from the funeral pile of dead afternoons, from the tinkling herd that grazed on the summits, from an associate herd boy with whom he had been no great friends, from the stone-built pen in which he had folded his lamb, that now stood up there without a ribbon and without any one to love him, and, finally, from the boundary-stone, on which once his sweetheart, his beauty, sat knitting--from all this, of course he turned his eyes away slowly, with many a long-lingering backward glance. "Ah!" he thought, "who will give thee citron-cakes and my little lamb crusts of bread? But I will send you over every day ever so many things!"

It was a pure October morning, the mist lay folded up at the feet of the heavens, the migrating summer still hovered with its blue pinions high over the foliage and the flowers which had brought it, and gazed with its broad and quietly warming sunny eye upon man, to whom it was bidding farewell. Gustavus would fain get out of the carriage, in order to wrap up the dew-sprinkled, fleeing summer, which, delicately woven, overspread the earth like a human life, and take it along with him. But thou, man! how often dost thou hang down over nature as a pestilential and mephitic vapor!

For they could hardly have gone on a league, after which he already began to take every village for Scheerau.... But I will first indicate where it was. At Yssig he screamed out in the wood: "O now the black arm yonder will reach in and take me out!" While the old man was still wondering how the little one knew that a finger-post was coming, which now actually pointed out from among the trees, all at once in behind there a voice began to scream: "Oh! my eyes! my eyes!" The child and the mother were petrified with terror; but the Captain leaped out from or through the carriage, smashed the glasses and bounded into the wood--and right upon a beautiful kneeling child, from whose lacerated eyes ran tears and water. "Oh, don't do anything to me, I can never see any more!" he said, and groped about him with his hands, in order to strike away the lancet which lay at his knees. "Who has done this?" said the Captain, with the softest voice, that broke with intense compassion; but ere the child spoke, an old haggard beggar-woman approached and said a beggar had darted into the thicket, who would fain have blinded the child, in order to beg with it. But the child clung with increasing convulsions to his hand, and said: "Oh, she will cut me again!" The Captain guessed the knavery, broke off the nearest branch, switched at the wretched woman's face with a rage that missed its aim, and ran with the blind boy in his arms to the affrighted carriage. It was a heart-rending spectacle, the innocent worm, with fine features and movements, in rags, and with red and wrinkled eyes!

NINTH SECTION.

Viscera Without Body.--Scheerau.

Not merely liars and L'Hombre players, but romance readers also, must have a good memory to learn by heart the first ten or twelve sections, as if they were declensions and conjugations, because without these they cannot get on in the exposition. With me no stroke is in vain; in my book and in my body there hang bits of spleen; but the use of this inward part will very soon be brought out. Since a romance writer, like a courtier, aims at one sole object, namely, to ruin his friend and hero and lead him into heavily charged tempests, accordingly, I, too, have been for the last quarter building up, here a gray cloud that vanishes, there one that melts away; but when at last I have irresistibly charged with electricity all cells of the horizon, then I compress the whole devil into a thunder-storm--after fourteen sheets have been struck off, the compositor can already hear and set up the crash.... At bottom, to be sure, there is not a word of truth in it all; but as other authors are fond of giving out their romances for biographies, the privilege will be granted me of sometimes divesting my biography of the appearance of a romance.

The child, instead of his history, gave mere lamentations over his history. He seemed over seven years old, spoke German with an Italian accent, and his sickly, delicate, and pale-red body enwrapped his soul as a pale rose-leaf does the worm within it. His father was named Doctor Zoppo, came from Pavia, botanized himself from Italy to Germany, and let the little ones tear yellow flowers along the way. The blind Amandus wanted to pluck in this wood herbs also, but the devilish she-oculist happened upon him, helped him find yellow flowers and lured him with them so far into the woods that she could rob him of his clothes and his eyes.

Gustavus kept asking him every minute whether he could not see yet, gave him his luncheon that he might leave off weeping, and could not, as his eyes were so widely open, comprehend his blindness. In the next country town Falkenberg got himself shaved and Amandus bandaged. I once saw at the last station before Leipsic such a charming traverse-band over the eye and forehead of a maiden, that I wished my wife might from time to time have a slight cut in that region, because it has a very neat effect; contrariwise the bandage over Amandus's two eyes made him look a child of woe.

When Amandus, in better clothing and with the sad bandage, sat in the carriage, Gustavus could not possibly cease weeping, and would fain get out his starling and present it to him; for sympathy is determined not by the size but by the shape of suffering.

Few persons who journey to Scheerau, will have the absurd fortune to meet suddenly, two leagues before arriving, a solitary carriage without the occupant appertaining to it; Falkenberg and his people and horses had this luck. This carriage was bearing the stomach, the thick and thin intestines, the liver, wherein princes seethe their gall, the lungs, whose air-bladders are the princely gall-bladders, as the wind-pipe is the gall-passage to the same, and the heart; but no corpse came with them; for the corpse, which was the reigning Lord of Scheerau, already lay in the hereditary vault. This stomach digested as much as his conscience did, namely, whole hides of land; and better than his thin head, to which truths and grievances (gravamina) were a heavy food; the Papinian stomach-machine remained even in advanced age still fiery, as indeed all else about him was childish. He used to ride for hours, a short time before his death, on a chamberlain, to whom he took a considerable liking; nevertheless, as a thoroughly sensible man, he thrust aside platter and glass, when the old and right contents no longer remained in either. Behind the sarcophagus of the intestines--the relic casket of the abdomen--rode the chief steward of the kitchen, several assistant cooks, the adjunct of the waiting service, and still greater members of the court establishment, e. g., the Medical Counsellor Fenk. He and Falkenberg did not observe each other. The latter was engrossed to-day with mere vanities: the Doctor, whom he sought in Italy, and the Prince, whom he still expected to find on the earth. The insolvent crowned entrails, which, in this way, could not pay money, involved him now in a financial litigation with the heir to the crown.

The funeral procession of the princely intestines went to the Abbey of Hopf, where occurred the interment of their princely members; which--if a word of Plato is to be believed--are true beasts, and with which man, be he enlaced with order-ribbons or harnessed with drawing-bands, always has his infernal tussle. I will follow the box of viscera just three steps, because the Medical Counsellor--according to his habit of amusing himself in all places, in theatre boxes and church pews and taverns, only not in his study, by writing--here in the burial church of the intestines untied his writing-tablets and wrote down things which literally read as follows: "As princes have themselves interred, just as they also reside, in several places at once, so would I, too--but only in this way, and no other: my stomach must be deposited in the Episcopal Church--my liver, with its bitter bladder, in a Court Church--the thick intestines in a Jewish oratory--the lungs in a mixed,[^[20]] or, at least, a University Church--the heart in the church triumphant, and the spleen in a Dissenting Chapel. But if I were first funeral preacher of a crowned abdomen, I should take another course; I should take the gullet for entrance or exordium of the funeral sermon and the blind gut for the close! And could I not in the three parts of my discourse run through the three concavities, touching lightly therein the nobler parts of the body, and, finally on its last passages, deliver myself in tears and eulogies out of the dust? For so one jests here below." There is a poetic frenzy--"fine frenzy"--but also a humorous, which Sterne had; but only readers of finished taste do not account the highest stretch of the faculty as overstraining.

The Falkenberg traveling train reached Scheerau at evening--the finest time to arrive anywhere, hence so many arrive at evening in the other world. It seemed to Gustavus as if he had been there before during his abduction. But as the fewest possible of my readers can have been abducted on account of their beauty, and therefore they do not know the city, it shall be shown up to them in the tenth section.

TENTH SECTION.

Upper-Lower-Scheerau.--Hoppedizel.--Herbarium.--Visitors' Croup.--Prince's Feathers.

No Geographer and Upper Consistorial Counsellor has ever yet had the misfortune which has befallen Herr Brüshcing--namely, of omitting in his topographical atlas a whole good principality, which shares a seat on the courtly bench of Wetteran and is called Scheerau--which, according to the imperial matriculation schedule, furnishes 8/9 of horse and 9-2/8 of foot, and pays the Master of the Exchequer 21 Fl. 1/91 Xr. (kreutzer)--which was promoted to princely rank under Charles IV.--which has its five fair representative Chambers, which have everywhere a say, but nothing to do; namely, the Commandery of the German Order, the University, the Knighthood, the cities and the towns, and which, among other inhabitants, contains also me. I would not stand in the shoes of such a writer--one who creeps with his geographic mirror into every cul-de-sac in order to take its likeness, and yet in this instance has skipped over a whole principality with its five paralytic estates; I know how it annoys him, but now that I have talked with the whole world about it there is no longer any help for him.

The capital city, Scheerau, consists properly of two cities--New, or Upper Scheerau, where the Prince resides, and Old, or Lower Scheerau, where the Captain lodges. I, for my part, have long been convinced that the Saxon houses are not half so far removed from the Frankforters as the Old and New Scheerauers are from each other in style, face, fare and everything. The New Scheerauer has court-style enough to have dignity, debts and passion for extra-domestic pleasures; and yet, again, too much chancery style--because all the highest colleges of the land are there--not to recognize or demand everywhere stiff subordination, or to sink from the Chamberlain to the Chancery Clerk and Auditor of the Treasury. Now, the old Scheerauer perceives this. On the other hand, the New Scheerauer perceives that the other has the following traits: If in China the jaws of a dinner-party must all move simultaneously like a double piano; if in Monomotapa the whole country sneezes every time the Emperor does; let one go to Old Scheerau, and there he will find things still better; at the same moment all streets must weep, cough, pray, ease themselves, hate and spit; their Blue Book looks like a musical score, from which all play the same piece, only with different instruments and voices, (only in music are they swayed by some true spirit of freedom, and none slavishly binds his elbow or fiddle-bow or quill [Tangenten] to his neighbor's)--they hate belles-lettres as much as they do one another--incapable of doing without social pleasures, of arranging or enjoying them, incapable of enterprise, of openly either hating or loving or enduring each other, they worm themselves into their money-piles and publicly respect the richest and privately only the relative, or, in fact, nobody at all--without taste and without patriotism and without reading....

But I am putting it quite too strongly; no reader will be willing to stir a step after the Captain towards Lower-Scheerau. Their greatest fault is, that they are good for nothing; but, aside from that, they are thrifty, full of none but trades-people, temperate, and sweep the streets and their faces nice and clean. Capitals, like courts, have a family-likeness; but country-towns inasmuch as more commercial, military, legal, mining or marine sap flows through them--a different full-face and half-face.

The Falkenberg ship's company alighted from its traveling ark before the plated front door of the Professor of Ethics, Hoppedizel; in the Professor's second story they usually had their winter quarters. Just behind the said door the Captain encountered an absurd melodrama, namely: the Raft Inspector, Peuschel, was leaning against the wall, vomiting and cursing; and regularly alternating from one to the other, as between Pentameter and Hexameter. The Professor of Morals quickly, with an uninked finger, wrote on the wall the outlines of the following words which he read off as fast as he traced them: "It was indeed disgusting, devilishly disgusting." Any other man the entrance of an old friend like Falkenberg would at once have disconcerted in the whole scene; the Professor, however, was not to be cheated out of his joke, but began his embrace in an unaltered tone with a report of the present case: "The gentleman before you. Raft Inspector Peuschel," (began Hoppedizel) "is fond of tippling, with wine particularly--it was in vain that the inspectoress, his lady"--(for discreet forbearance was never on Hoppedizel's lips)--"had sought to reform him by letting a live frog die in his wine. He himself" (he added) "had therefore to-day tried his hand at making this guzzling sicken him. For he had luckily cut a gall-stone--as thick as a Muscatelle-pear--out of a University subject; this he had hollowed out into a drinking urn and made Herr Peuschel believe it was of lava and to-day had let his vomiting friend drink out of it genuine Hungarian wine of the best crop; and that it might not fail to nauseate him and set his crop into a reaction, he had only a few minutes before made it clear to his patient that the volcanic beaker was veritable gravel-stone. And he hoped it would be some time before his friend would get this piece of earthenware out of his head."

The Professor begged the Inspector to do him the favor, in case the nausea left him, of staying there this evening and joining the Captain in a spoonful of soup.

There are certain houses where, let one visit them as often as he will, one shall find everything revised and turned up and turned over; this was emphatically the case in Hoppedizel's establishment; and the Captain's winter quarters looked always like a summer house in winter. People of refinement charm us by a certain delicate attention to another's little necessities, by an anticipation of his slightest wishes, by a constant sacrifice of their own, by courtesies that wind their silken web more softly and securely round our hearts than the cutting love-cord of a great benefaction. Hoppedizel used neither the silk nor the cord, and cared for nobody. It was not from absence of fine feeling, but from rebellion against it, that, when the Captain, the very first week, cursed both his quarters and his landlord, he simply laughed at him.

The delicate Amandus kept his sickbed all the evening and Gustavus crept to his side, in order to play with him. How, in the Arabia Petrea of the hateful world, are we refreshed by the sight of children who love one another, and whose good little eyes and little lips and little hands are no masks!

The next day an accident again took the two children away from each other. The Captain led them through all the streets of the city as through a picture gallery, and silently stopped at last with the two foster-brothers of the heart before the house of his friend Dr. Fenk, and looked wistfully at his picture (on the sign.) It represented a Doctor's coach with a Physician inside, Death in front, harnessed into the shafts, and the Devil sitting up on the box. "The dear, good droll," thought he, "might surely just trudge home from his Italy and give his friends a pleasure!" For he had not heard a word of his actual return. "Mandus! Mandus! run up!" cried suddenly a little maid overhead, who seemed on wires, and came herself skipping down and plucked and pecked at the little fellow. The good-natured Captain gladly followed the children out of the great parterre into the familiar house, and his astonishment at all signs of Fenk's return ceased only with the rushing in of the Doctor himself. The latter, when half way towards embracing him, bounded back to the little blind boy and amidst tears and kisses snatched off the bandage--examined the eyes for a long time at the window--and said, after drawing a long breath: "God be praised and thanked! he is not blind!" Now, for the first time, the Doctor flung his arms, with redoubled warmth, around his friend. "Pardon me, it is my child!" Nevertheless he drew Amandus again to the light, and examined him still longer, and said, with raised eyebrows; "It seems to be merely a lesion of the sclerotica; the oculist-woman let out the aqueous humor. In Pavia I saw it done every week with dogs, whose eyes the dentists (our medical feudal-cousins) slit up and spread over them a stupid salve. When afterwards the humor and the sight came back of themselves, the salve had the credit of it."

I skip over the stream of the outpouring, conversational and joyous, of the two friends, which left them hardly eye or ear for anything, least of all the clock. "Ah, here they come," said Fenk, namely, the guests. As my readers have understanding enough, they can permit me, I hope, to finish my narrative before they take down their rod of wrath, against the imaginary posterior of the Doctor, from behind the looking-glass.

No one had such a burning hatred as he for the narrowness, intolerance, and provincial pedantry of the inhabitants of Lower Scheerau, wherewith they made a short life so much the shorter to themselves, and a sour one so much the more sour. "It disgusts me to be praised by them"--he not merely said that, but he even loved to exasperate by putting the worst face upon his purest motives, the whole town, from one end to the other; meanwhile, in the tenderness of his heart, he could not do more than vex the whole city in grosso, never one single person. For this reason on the second morning after his arrival he glided about like an influenza from one house to another, and invited all aunts, cousins, blood-relations and blood-enemies, people in whom he had no interest save as they belonged to the dear Christendom, e. g., the Raft Inspector, Peuschel, the Late-Director Eckert, with his four late-pears of daughters, and all that had breath in Unter-Scheerau--he invited all in a body to spend an afternoon, and inspect a rarity he had brought home with him, namely, a herbarium vivum, which he would exhibit. "It was no live book of plants, but something quite special, and he had brought home from the glaciers the very best."

And these all were now coming, not because they cared the least for a book of plants, but because they wanted to see it, and incidentally the bachelor Doctor's housekeeping. I must confess thus much to the European courts, that the whole assembled township and cousinship swept in and coughed and hemmed their way through with grace; and the four late-pears were not wanting in good-breeding, but made instead of bows profound genuflexions and kept very well their perpendicular position. The host then brought in two long folios of plants, and said in a friendly manner he should take pleasure in showing them all--and now he kindled the hell into which he cast the company--he crawled with caterpillar's feet and snail-slime from leaf to leaf of book and plant; he showed nothing superficially; he went through the pistils, stamens, anthers of every single plant; he said he should weary them if he were more copious, and would describe, therefore, name, country, and natural history of every group very briefly. All faces burned, all backs were roasted, all toes were in a fidget. Vainly did one cousin attempt to turn away her eyes toward the blind Amandus, only for the sake of looking at something animal; the botanical connoisseur fastened their attention upon a new dust-bag which he at that moment eulogized. He had already dragged his club to the Pentandria,[^[21]] when he said: "This evening must find us in the neighborhood of the Dodecandria [of twelve stamens]; but it will cost toil and sweat." He grew more and more delighted with the universal lamentation over such a purgatorial afternoon, the like of which no Scheerauer had ever before experienced, and said their attention fired his enthusiasm in the highest degree. Still the botanic candidates let themselves be martyred from one leaf to another, and would have obligingly stayed it out, till the Captain, although he divined the prank, grew infernally impatient and was on the point of going. The Doctor said he should have to reserve the second folio for another lesson; but he wished they would come again soon, that would be the only evidence that they had been pleased to-day. The mere thought of the second folio-torture, to which the Theresian[^[22]] Codex with its racking pictures is but a pocket-almanac with monthly engravings, brought with it something of a feverish shudder. Thus had they disgracefully lost a whole half day without a bit of scandal, gossip, or calumny, which might have been carried home with them and retailed through the neighborhood. The elder dames usually visited balls and concerts, not at all, however, to be seen, but to see, and to elaborate there physiognomical fragments for the furtherance of the knowledge of humanity, though not for the promotion of philanthropy. Nay, they loved to visit even their avowed enemies, when there was a shot to be fired at an absent enemy; as wolves, who flee one another, nevertheless ally themselves together for the death of another wolf. I have always taken pleasure in observing how heartily and with what friendship a pair of Scheerau ladies sympathize with each other when they have the least scandal to bring out of their budget against a third. Only when two no longer sit beside each other on the sofa, but turn their faces instead of their hips towards each other, then I would rather not be the one they handle.

* * * *

Extra Lines on the Quinsy which Attacks all the Ladies in Scheerau at the Sight Of a Stranger of their own Sex.

To the men of that place the sight of a strange lady does little harm; it merely causes all frizzlers and barbers to come a little later than usual; at the billiard tables the cues or tobacco pipes point up into the air, and the teachers of the worthy gymnasium do not stop at all on that account. On the contrary the women!--

On the island of St. Hilda, when a stranger disembarks there occurs a misfortune which no philosopher has yet been able to explain--the whole country coughs on his account.[^[23]] All villages, all corporate bodies, all ages cough--if the passenger makes a purchase, the provision dealers cough, at the gate the military do it, and the body of teachers cough over their lessons. It is of no use at all to call in the physician--he barks more than his patients and is his own patient....

In Lower Scheerau the same misfortune occurs, only in a greater degree. Let a strange lady set foot in the post-house, in the concert hall or ball-room, immediately all the women of Scheerau are compelled to cough, and--which always proceeds from a sore throat--to speak lower--all are attacked by quinsy, i. e., the angina vera. The poor ladies show all signs of the most virulent inflammation of the throat; heat (hence the fanning) chills, distress for breath, fancies, swollen nostrils, heartburn. Cooling remedies, water, clearing of the air tubes, prove the most effectual thus far for the fair patients. But if (which Heaven avert!) the strange lady who enters is the handsomest--the cleverest--the richest--the famousest--the most celebrated--the most tasteful--then not a single sufferer in the whole hospital is cured; such an angel becomes a true death angel, and one should absolutely prevent any stranger of merit from passing the gate.

The attack, like every other malady, is most aggravating in autumn and winter during the winter gaieties and among the winter guests. This quinsy is ascribed by wit or understanding to two causes: first, to external or shell-merits (never to inner ones); thus, too, Unzer thinks that crustaceous animals act most upon the throat, hence, e. g., oysters produce difficulty of swallowing, calcined crabs counteract hydrophobia, steam of crabs produces dumbness, scorpions lameness of the tongue. The second reason is, that ladies in a city live as on an insulating stool, and if a stranger of their sex, who has not been put en rapport with them, touches the manipulated clairvoyants, or even stands at a distance from them, these latter feel ugly sensations in all their limbs.

End of the Extra Lines.

* * * *

After the botanical divine-service Fenk gave the departing ladies of Scheerau the additional piece of information to take home with them, as an altar-benediction, leaving it to them, meanwhile, to make the sign of the crossover it: That the two children, whom they had seen, the little boy and the little girl, had had no other cradle than the traveling carriage; but that he, at present, had become at once Pestilentiary and Medical Counsellor; he preferred however to cure women only, and in time hoped to wed one, and hereby made a standing offer....

When the people of Lower Scheerau have anything put upon them which seems at once sweet, sour and senseless, at first they listen to it--then they smile at it--then reflect upon it--then cannot see into it--then for three days surmise nothing good of it--and finally become fairly enraged about it. Fenk did not trouble himself about that, but said from time to time something or other and what neither they nor he himself understood.

Thereupon he explained all to the Captain, as I do to the reader. The pressed plants, he said, would keep, henceforth, all aunts and ninnies and visiting ants away from his lodgings, as an enclosing hemp-thread does caterpillars from a vegetable garden. That he communicated only half the history of his travels and a riddle or two growing out of it, because one becomes most interested in persons about whom one has something left him to guess, and the curious patient females would become his female patients. Whether he was married or not, he did not himself know; nor should others know, because all whose houses were sale-rooms of daughters would invite him in as physician that he might come out again as bridegroom. Finally, that the reasons of his taking only female patients were these: that they were the most numerous; that this exclusive practice would beget a peculiar confidence in him; that this confidence was a woman-doctor's whole dispensary; that most of the ailments of women consisted merely of weaknesses, and their whole cure in abstinence from--medicine; that apothecaries' shops were only for men, not for women; and because he liked full as well to adore as to cure them.

Another point was this, how he had so quickly come to Scheerau and come so quickly to be Medical Counsellor. This was the way: the hereditary Prince, who at this moment on the high throne-coach-box will drive with the state-carriage to the devil, loves nobody; on his journey he made jests upon his mistresses; his friendship is only a lesser degree of hatred, his indifference is a greater; but the greatest, which stings him like a heartburn, he cherishes for his unmarried brother, Captain von Ottomar, Fenk's friend, who had stayed in Rome in the midst of the most beautiful natural nature, as well as artistic, in order to revel in the enjoyments of Roman landscapes and antiques. Ottomar seemed a genius in the good sense as well as in the bad. He and the hereditary Prince could hardly endure each other in ante-chambers, and were often on the point of a duel. Now the Grand Duke of Scheerau hates poor Fenk also, first, because the latter is a friend of his foe; secondly, because he once restored to life and to his allowance-money the hereditary Prince's third brother; thirdly, because the Prince needed far less reasons (or in fact none) for hating any one than for loving him.

Now the Doctor would have been glad to be made Medical Counsellor under the former administration, whose stomach we met on the road; under the coming administration, whose stomach was still filling itself in Italy, there was little chance for him. The Doctor sought therefore to get his fortune firmly rooted a week or two before the new coronation. He found the old minister still at his post, who was patron and whose patron the hereditary Prince was far from being, for the reason that leads hereditary princes generally to think that they must get the creatures of their dead father under the ground just as certainly, only more slowly and delicately, as savage tribes do, who lay on the funeral-pile of the king his favorites and servants also.

When Fenk came, the deceased Regent made him all he wanted to be: for it was in this way: When the departed father of his people had become in the physiological sense a child of the people, i. e., had returned to the age of which he was when they had hung upon him the first order-ribbon instead of leading-strings, namely, six and a half years, the eternal signing of his cabinet decrees became much too disagreeable to the Prince, and at last impossible. As, however, he must after all still govern, when he could no longer write, the court-engraver cut his decreeing name so well in stone that he had only to dip the stamp in ink and press it while moist under the edict: then he had his edict before him. In this way he governed fifteen per cent. easier; but the minister one hundred per cent., who, at last, out of gratitude, in order to relieve the enfeebled Prince even of the heavy handling of the stamp, dipped, himself, the beautiful seal (which he preferred to Michael Angelo's) into his own ink-stand; so that the old lord, several days after his death, had subscribed sundry vocations and rescripts--but this modeling-stamp of men in general became the insect's-laying-sting[^[24]] and father of the best government officials, and at last spawned the Pestilentiary.

Extra-Thoughts Upon Regents' Thumbs.

Not the crown but the inkstand oppresses Princes, Grand Masters and Commanders; not the Sceptre, but the Pen do they find so much difficulty in wielding, because with the former they merely command, but with the latter they have to sign what is commanded. A cabinet councillor would not wonder if a tormented crowned scribe should, like Roman recruits, amputate his thumb, in order to be freed from the eternal making of his mark, as they do to escape fighting. But the reigning and writing heads keep the thumb; they see that the welfare of the land requires their dipping the pen,--the little illegibleness on cabinet orders which one calls their name, opens and shuts, like a magic formula, money-chests, hearts, gates, warehouses, ports; the black drop of their pen manures and forces or macerates whole fields. Professor Hoppedizel had, when he was first teacher of morals to the Scheerau Infante, a good idea, although only in his last month: might not the princely tutor command the sub-tutor to let the crown-abecedarian, who of course must one day learn to write, instead of useless bills of feoffment merely scrawl his name in the middle of every blank leaf? The child would write his signature without disgust on as many pages as would be needed in his whole administration--the sheets might be laid away against the child's coronation--and then (he continued) when he had bespattered pages enough, as a college would often require his signature yearly, if, accordingly on New Year's day the necessary number of signed reams had been distributed among the colleges to last the whole year--what more would the child need to do in his whole administration?

End of the Extras-thoughts.

* * * *

One word more: after nine weeks the Doctor's revenge by means of the plant-book produced in him, as the least revenge does in every good man, a painful reaction. "The Herbarium," said he, "annoys me, as often as I stick anything into it; but it is certainly true, a man shall have passed through all capital cities and retain his modesty: at the very gate of his native town the devil of pride enters into him and accompanies him on his first visits--his good fellow citizens, he will have it, must during his absence have become rational."

ELEVENTH SECTION.

Amandus's Eyes.--Blindman's Buff.

That sympathy which grafts, by approach, grown up people in the first quarter of an hour, often draws children also to each other. Our couple flew into each other's arms and hugged each other over forty times a day. You good children! Be glad that you can venture to express your love still more strongly than by letters. For culture restricts the bodily domain of love's expression within narrower and narrower limits--this haggard Duenna took away from us first the whole body of the one we love--then the hand, which we are no longer allowed to press--then the buttons and the shoulders, which we are no more permitted to touch--and of a whole woman she has given us nothing to kiss, except (as a kind of hair) the glove--we all now manipulate each other at a distance. Amandus with his more feminine heart hung upon Gustavus's more manly one with all the love which the weaker gives the stronger, more richly than it wins back from it love in return. Hence woman loves man more purely; she loves in him the present object of her heart, he in her, oftentimes, the image of his fancy; hence comes his fickleness and vacillation. This little preface must be taken only as an introduction to a little passage of arms between our little Castor and Pollux.

Namely: they could not bear to be so long apart, as it took to unbind and bind up the eyes. As often as the bandage came off, Gustavus stood before him and absolutely demanded that he should see him, and put his finger up to his own nose and said: "Where do I touch now?" But he examined the blind boy without seeing. After a week's absence Amandus ran up to him, saying: "Shove up my bandage, I can certainly see thee too as well as my cat Harry!" When Gustavus had lifted[^[25]] it up, and when it proved that he actually passed into the eye of his cured friend, just as he was, coat, shoes and stockings, then was he gladder than a patriot whose Prince opens his eyes or his bandage and sees him. He inventoried his picture-cabinet before his eyes with a perpetual "look!" at every piece. But yet further! The world will know little of it--except those minute particles thereof, the children, of whom it is that I am just going to speak--that these latter played blindman's buff at Hoppedizel's. A disagreeable game!--when there are girls in the case, as there were here, especially such naughty ones as the Professor's were. Amandus introduced himself into the game, and ran round the room, behind the handkerchief, which female cunning had folded over his eyes, catching nothing but disembodied clothes. Unfortunately, crawling, contrary to all proper rules of the game, under the stove, they came against the milk-pan of the dog Spitz. As, now, they had read at that time too few moral philosophers, although they had seen enough of them, accordingly, for want of pure practical reason, they softly pushed the pan so far forward that the groping catch-poll easily trampled upon and tipped it over. Gustavus, as a child, could not help laughing a little. The little sinners threw the blame on him and cried: "O you! if now Amandus had received an injury?" The latter extricated himself from the wet fragments and slightly thumped Gustavus, who was holding him by the hands to comfort him behind on the shoulder-blade, just where according to the Compends the chyle (or milk-juice) joins the blood. "I didn't set it there, indeed I didn't," said he. "Yes, yes! and didn't tell me of it," replied the blindman and gave him another push, only more violently and yet less angrily. "Strike away, I did not do anything to thee," and my good hero's voice broke--the other struck at him again and said: "I will never be friends with you any more," but said it as if he was just on the point of weeping. "Ah, thou hast surely run a splinter into thy hand?" asked Gustavus with the most sympathetic voice--in the midst of attempting a fresh punch the thin crust of ice melted down from the warmed heart of Amandus, he embraced the innocent one, and said with glistening tears: "No, indeed! thou hast not done anything, and I will give thee all my playthings; I pray thee, beat me right hard," and so saying he beat himself. It is only the feeling of love that struggles with such bitter-sweet singularities. Amandus often confessed that whenever he had done injustice to any one, in the midst of his grief about it, the propensity always seized him to keep on offending, in order to continue grieving himself so far that at last for very anguish he must needs throw himself with the most ardent love upon the heart of the injured one. But, oh dear Amandus, if a pedagogue in the form of a moral code had happened to open the door!

It must never be supposed that I would vent here personal resentment upon tutors in a body, for, in the first place, I never had any tutor at all, and, secondly, I have been one myself, and a proper one.

TWELFTH SECTION.

Concert.--The Hero Gets a Fashionable Tutor.

I have betaken myself to a new section because I have therein to present to the reader a new person--the Tutor of my hero.

I need not remind a soul, that the Captain looked for so foolish a thing--a thing now too pliable, now too bashful--such a moralizing, spiritless thing as a tutor, in Scheerau, in order that his child might get a regent at the same time with the country. Now, he had there a godfather, who practiced law, music, small talk and the lorgnette and the world's manners; but he had not the courage to propose to that party the office of instruction in a seminary of which the number of pupils amounted to one male. I will just say it out at once, that I myself am this godfather and this new personage; but it will stand my modesty in better stead, if, in a section where I must needs bring forward so much in my own praise, I transpose myself out of the first person into the third, and say merely godfather, not I.

This godfather blew in the Unter-Scheerau Concert, in order, with his flute, to accompany the heavenly voice of a very young Fraülein von Röper, whose throat could often hardly be distinguished from the flute. The whole soul of this damsel is a nightingale's tone under an overhanging curtain of blossoms; her body is a falling, heavenly-pure snowflake, which lasts only in the ether and melts away on the filthy ground. The flutist's eyes and heart were arrested, during the pauses, by a beautiful child, who was lost in a dreamy, phantasying gaze of rapturous attention: it was Gustavus. His first look, after the accompaniment, was toward the neighborhood of the child, in order to find his owner--the first step the godfather took was to the other godparent, the Captain, whose friendly relations with me are well enough known. The male sex is more fortunate and less envious than the female, because the former is able to appreciate with the whole soul two kinds of beauty, male and female; whereas women, for the most part, love only that of the other sex. I, however, have, perhaps, too much enthusiasm for that exalted thing, manly beauty, as well as for poetic enthusiasm, notwithstanding that, of the latter at least, I myself have nothing. From Gustavus the double enchantment acted upon me; I forgot all the enchantresses of the concert in the enchanter; but in the end I was sad, because I could win fewer words than glances from the lovely boy. To the concert, moreover, I, like the rest of the hearers, paid attention only so long as I myself was a fellow-laborer, or as long as one of my female pupils played; for the Scheerau concerts are merely town-talk and prosaic melodramas set to music, wherein the gossip of the hearers in their seats runs along as printed text under the composition. For the rest we subscribe to our concerts more for our children's sake than our own; the musical school-youth get there a dancing floor and riding-school for their fingers and one at least of my catechumens weekly thrums and thrashes the harpsichord. I encourage the parents to this, and say that in such a concert-hall the little ones learn time, because of that there is not only enough there, but more than enough, inasmuch as every musical functionary there pipes, beats, strikes, stamps his own original time, which, in the first place, no one of his neighbors pipes, beats, strikes or stamps after him, and which he himself, secondly, improves from minute to minute. And even if this were not so, I tell them, still there is true musical expression there, and enough to spare; every one expresses there his own emotions, whether of embarrassment or of complete confusion, on his particular instrument; and Bach's rule, to render dissonances forcibly and consonances faintly, every one understands in a hall where the consonances melt in so softly that one can hardly catch a single one of them, and fancies he hears only the discords.

The next morning I flew, half-dressed, to the Captain and--as I could not secure the dear little fellow at any lower price--I brought him right up to the first object of his journey, namely, to take a tutor home with him. It must not be thought that I got myself made an instructor in order to be a biographer, i. e., in order craftily to educate into my Gustavus all that I afterward wanted to write out of him into a book; for, in the first place, I, surely, as a romance-manufacturer, needed merely to imagine myself such, and impose the fiction upon others; but, secondly, at that time a biography had not been thought of.

It is of far less concern to me to see that my Scheerau relations are understood, than to the world, for I know them already, but the world does not. I formed there a Trinity of three persons. I was music master, legal adviser, and man of the world. Three whimsical parts! I studied in a city which once furnished the greatest jurists and now furnishes the smallest dogs, two quite opposite articles, as Paris was once the University of all European theologues and is now of philosophers. I have been in Paris also. There, too, I might have become a clever Parliamentary advocate but I would not, and brought nothing away from there with me (as well as from Bologna and some German Imperial cities) but the black legal cloak, which has its reason; for as our clients feed and fee us, and retain more justice and poverty than money, accordingly we patrons mourn for them in black. With the Romans, on the contrary, the clients, who got more than they gave, put on for the advocate, when he came off poorly, a mourning suit.

Secondly, I was music master, but perhaps not a very steady one; for I fell in love with all my female pupils the first quarter (male pupils I declined), and let my feelings shape themselves after my lessons. I cherished a true tenderness, first, towards a lady of rank, whom I will never compromise; secondly, towards her sister, an Abbess, because she learned thorough bass of me; thirdly, towards...; fourthly, towards the wife of the Court Chaplain, who, it is true, is hectic but æsthetic, and who loved too much rather than too little embellishment upon the piano (in the local sense of the proposition), and polished, covered and set out the instrument to the finest effect; fifthly, with the lady of the Minister-resident, von Bouse, who has not the least idea of the fact, and at whose hips and charms I was actually stupid with admiration, till I fortunately detected her indiscriminate coquetry and her infidelity to her incognito lover; sixthly, with the whole Court of Scheerau, where, according to the right of the dead hand, I looked upon the reception of a live hand, which offered itself for a pupil of mine, as an investment of the whole heart and goods; seventhly, even with a veritable child, Beata (the above mentioned daughter of Röper), for whom I, once a week in bad weather, and for an equally poor salary, ran out into the country, and with whom one could absolutely think of nothing else but love. In short, there is nothing, leaf-buds, blossom-buds, blossoms, fruits, with which a man does not get entangled who is a teacher of the piano.

Now comes the Man of the World. I cannot, to be sure, show myself personally to my readers (of whom I should be glad to have the population and exact tabulated statement); but the people of Scheerau, before whom this leaf comes, are hereby challenged to speak out their thoughts and decide whether a man who gives the great world three piano lessons daily is any more its teacher than its scholar. Dignity, grace of gait, taste in dress, attitudes, perpendicular, horizontal and diagonal, are not, to be sure, the required merits of an author (though they are of the fine gentleman), and cannot be printed; but this much only I contend for, that it is only at a court one learns all this, especially when he has some influence and takes part as a player, whether at the Hombre table or at the piano table,[^[26]] which, like many a breast at the court, under the dumb wooden surface, conceals a sweet stringed instrument. Of course, when one walks up and down in his study again, among great books and great men, accompanied by the whole republican past, uplifted to the profound perspective of the infinite world beyond the grave, then even the possessor of them despises his shells of empty distinctions. He asks himself: Is there nothing better than to be master over his body (instead of over his passions) and to carry it as lightly as after the first three glasses of champagne--to tone down his style to the universal style, because at courts and at pianos no key must sound out above another--to glide along on the thin joggling board of female fancies with such a flying touch that our steps merely accompany the swaying--to dance and walk elegantly, so far as is practicable with one long leg (for, of course, if a piano teacher has to contend with a short leg, the Old Boy may stand on both if he can, as gracefully as the Prince of Artois)--in short, to sublimate all sense into nonsense, all truths into concerts, all honest feelings into pantomimic parodies? Nothing better is there? Ask the perambulator of the study. There is something far better--to be a tutor in Auenthal to such a child of heaven as Gustavus is, and put the whole vagary in print.

THIRTEENTH SECTION.

Public Mourning of the Knaves.--Prince of Scheerau.-- Princely Debts.

The Crown-Prince, for whose payment of his debts the Captain waited, was still on the high-road in foreign parts, whence he drove up on to the throne as up into a tower. Three miserable knaves made their entry still earlier than he. The thing can be narrated: Since the death of His Highness of most blessed memory--the Pope is the highest and most blessedest--one church after another in Scheerau had been, not plundered, but dismantled; the church thieves merely stripped off again the public mourning-cloth, which was on our pulpits and altars. The sextons and choristers found every morning the holy places scalped and the parsons had to stand there in the morning service. Now that money-grasping condor, the commercial agent Röper, had lately caused altar and pulpit in the Maussenbach Church to be rigged out in a frock of black cloth--figured was not holy and cheap enough for him. This sable wrappage was left on them as public mourning--old Röper had consequently very little sleep any longer, because he feared the church-vultures would rob the Maussenbach altar of its festal robing and carry off at the same time the certificate stitched to the cloth which set forth in silken and silver letters who had presented it all. His lawyer, Kolb, therefore, to whom thief-catching is sable-hunting and pearl-fishery, invested the church with all kinds of falcon-eyes; but all would have amounted to nothing had not Falkenberg's servant Robisch on Sunday evening, so soon as the church was closed, said to the schoolmaster, "he should leave it just as it was, he had counted the congregation, and three had not come out with the rest." In short they blockaded the temple till night and fortunately hauled out three secreted cloth-corsairs from the sacred place. The next morning there was a general astonishment; the three church-goers rode in through the gate of Scheerau on a hangman's cart, having on, all of them, black coats and trowsers--at night they had disappeared. For the court (if it had not yet gone to sleep) it was a hateful prospect, that a band of robbers should have put on court-mourning as well as itself, and have stolen for that purpose the mourning wardrobe out of the churches.

"You ought to be hanged," said the Captain to his fellow, "to bring poor thieves to grief, who take nothing from any man, but only from churches." "But surely for such knaves," said I, "it is not fitting to put on court-mourning, if only on account of the expense. In fact why is it that one may not mourn for his personal father[^[27]] though he may for the father of his country? Or why does the Privy Chamber even allow weeping to the children of the land, when, surely, that exhausts the lachrymal glands of the State, and when tears, too, are exempt from taxation?"

"You go too far," said the Captain, "the present administration must keep on in the course it has thus far pursued, if it is to distinguish itself from all its predecessors by the solicitude with which it watches over our grounds, our pennies and our purses."

"The negro-dealers," said the Doctor, but irrelevantly enough, "are still more watchful; for a slave-trader is more troubled by the unfitness of such or such an article--of men or slaves, than of his own wife. Even flexibility of limb and grace in dancing his human live-stock must possess and he cudgels them into it."

"Agriculture," he continued, "trade, manufactures, even national wealth and welfare, in short the bodies of his subjects, the worst despot can rear and nourish--but for their souls he can do nothing, without acting at every step against his own."

It has often occurred to me, whether mourning-regulations or delegations have not for their object that the sly and sad citizen may avail himself of the liberty of public mourning in order to throw in his domestic mourning into the common mass? Might he not lay up his individual sorrow over the mortality of his aunts, his cousins, till a general application occurred, and so, when the country had wound the condolatory crape round arm and sword, do up all the mourning in a lump and grieve under the same crape for a mother of the country and a step-mother? For courts 'twere easy. Nay, could not these, in fact, in the public mourning mourn for their relations in advance? Might not one, after all, let the whole nonsense drop?...

At last my new sovereign rode in his traveling carriage up on to the throne, and exchanged the coach-canopy for the throne-canopy. The Captain, before the coronation, held a petition in readiness, wherein with the defiance of a saddler, he demanded his money; after the coronation the Prince, like a diamond, had absorbed so much fiery splendor from his crown and his sceptre, that his creditor got his lawyer to draw up a new memorial in which he insisted merely on the interest. As he got nothing, not so much as a resolution, he determined to demand more. For he did not consider that our reigning providers in Scheerau seldom have any money. When we receive or send extraordinary embassies, when we have occasion for baptism or burial, not to mention wars, in such cases we have little or nothing but--extra-taxes, those metallic props and clamps of the rotten throne. In the exchequer-chest, as in heraldry, we denote silver by vacant space.

But both debtor and creditor soon found relief. The latter, the Captain, was marching, as cicerone, with his Gustavus through the cadet quarters and showing him everything for the sake of praising everything, because he was one day to put his head into a gorget--when the young Prince came in also and inspected all the apartments, not in order to forget all on the next saddle, but in order to observe nothing at all. I was sorry--for I had come in at the same time--that every professor relied upon it the Regent would number, if not every hair on his head, yet every lock in his peruke; for he did not so much as notice me and my dignity; very naturally, however, since such a dignity had already become an old story with him, as seen in the finest salons of all lands. He wore--for how long had he been back from his travels?--the princely hat with the nonchalance of a lady's hat; no long administration had yet pressed in the crown to make a dark line around his brow, and the erect persons around him had not yet been refracted by the media and moisture and membranes of his eye into crooked prison-laborers. His words he handed round with the munificence of a man of the world, as he would so much snuff; at last Falkenberg also got a pinch. I see my two principals still standing vis-a-vis--my noble and lending principal with the firm but respectful decorum of a soldier, compressed into embonpoint and swelling muscles, and with the confiding kindliness which good-natured persons cherish towards every one who is at the moment talking with them--the crowned and insolvent principal, however, with the picturesque dignity, in which every limb bends inward respectfully to the others, and in which the very attitude is a prolonged flattery, with a drapery of many folds in his pain-racked face, with a complaisance which neither refuses nor consents. My god-father regarded the stereotype complacency of the crowned head as exclusively directed to him; he thought the latter put his questions for the sake of getting an answer; and particularly when my most gracious prince and sovereign had actually expressed himself to the effect that "the little Gustavus was in his place here," that "he excited a stronger interest by his air de réveur, than one could explain to himself," and that "so soon as he should be old enough for this institution, one would buy him off from his father for 13,000 Rix dollars cash down:" then was the Captain thrown out of his wits, or rather out of his petition; his petitionary paper was turned into a thanksgiving address; his wish was, that I had already been tutor in his home for eight years; his hope was, the money would follow; and the real advantage was, that his son would get into the best German military academy.

It will be doing me no favor if any one ridicules him. To be sure he swore at his castle: "He wouldn't trust courtiers a hand's breath, and the whole nation was an offence to his nostrils;" on the other hand, he trusted such court-people as he had, at the moment, to do with him, somewhat more, only--military ignorantia legum must bear much of the blame in his case; how is he, as a soldier, to know that a prince is not bound to pay any debt?--Perhaps it is not even known to all readers so well as they may assume to themselves. For three reasons a regent need not pay a farthing which he has borrowed of his subjects (if his royal father was the borrower, it is understood, of course). First: an ambassador, be he of the first or third rank, would fly into the face of the oldest publicists, if he should discharge his debts; now he who is the mere representative and brimstone printed copy of the regent, cannot possibly have rights which are denied the original, consequently is not paid. Secondly: The prince is--or else we can no longer believe another word of our academical afternoon lessons--the true summary, abstract and representative of the State (as the envoy, again, is a representative of the representative or a portable state in small), and consequently so stands for each member of the body politic that lends him a kreutzer, as if he himself were that member; accordingly he in reality lends to himself, when such a part and parcel of his representative self makes him a loan. Very well! that is granted; but then one must also grant that a prince would make himself as ridiculous if he should pay back to his own subjects, as the father of General Sobouroff did when he honorably refunded to himself the capital which he had advanced to himself, with the legal interest of the country, and paid the penalty to himself according to the statutes of exchange; whence could it come then, except from their relationship to the throne and its privileges, that even great ones, great in reference to rank and amount of debts, were allowed to become bankrupt? Or why is a legal consensus book or register of mortgages the most exact Court Blue-book or Almanac royal? Thirdly: The most botched subject can secure from his prince letters of respite or moratoria; but who shall give them to the prince, unless he does it to himself? And if he does not do it for conscience sake, he can at least every five years grant a renewed quinquennial.

But there is no fourth reason that I know of.

FOURTEENTH SECTION.

Connubial Ordeals.--Five Biters Bit.

So now, Falkenberg has a tutor, the hope of the 13,000 Rixthalers, and a cadetship for his son--all he wanted now was recruits. These, too, were brought in to him and his under-officers in abundance by the Moloch-of-Moles, Robisch: but I know not what the clients meant, that, when Robisch had once secured his brokerage and they their christening-present, they for the most part made-off with the latter. In the Maussenbach woods thieves fell upon the transport and at the end of the battle thieves and transports had both fled from the field. This afflicted the Captain sorely, because he, who for himself and his family never committed the most profitable injustice, sometimes allowed a small one on the recruiting ground.

To the quiet Gustavus the noisy city-winter brought the longest hours. He saw no white head-band and no black lamb go by, without flying over on a sigh back to his enchanted wall and into the midst of his summer joys. When the ill-bred posterity of Hoppedizel looked upon him as stupid, because he was not crafty, and proud because he was not loud, he stanched the bleeding of his inner man, which was teased and ridiculed, with the thought of the beings who had loved him, of his Genius and his Shepherdess. For the sake of his Amandus he would so gladly have had another neighborhood than Hoppedizel's, even the grounds and the free sky of his home! He loved to have things still and snug around him, and to be encircled with the immensity of nature. Oh! when thou art once beside me, darling, how will I indulge and love thee! Thine eye shall never be clouded beside my desk of instruction, thy heart never heavy! Thou, tender plant, shalt not be tied to me with cutting pack-threads as to a straightening hop-pole, but with living ivy-roots shalt thou of thyself twine around me, as a living thing!

On the whole in Hoppedizel's home they led a confounded dog's life, as I myself often witnessed, when I and the master of the house in a dispute on the first principles of morals had each other, in a moral way merely, by the hair: for all, meanwhile, had a hand and its match in the business, but physically; one dog was pitted against another dog, the boys against the girls--the servants against one another--the heads of the house against the servants--the Professor against the Professoress, whereof a memorable fact is to be printed--and all these alternately against each other according to the law of Permutation.

Unfortunately Hoppedizel never had any respect (and consequently no disrespect either) for anybody; he borrowed on all sides, soiled all he touched, compromised every one, pardoned everybody and himself first of all. In the Captain's winter quarters the oil-painted tapestry (24 groschen the yard) formed a Spanish wall or screen between the Captain's empty room and the cracks in the wall for the bugs to pass through; the stove was good, but, like the tower of Babel, without a cupola; the ceiling of the apartment threatened (though, like many throne-canopies, for a long time without actual damage) to break down and crush the heads of the greatest philosophers, who stood, in stone, on the pier-table. He, therefore, had often little tenderness for people, because he took for granted that they had too much of it to scold at the invisibleness of his;--in Lower Scheerau we do just so. But now comes the catastrophe which hastened the flight of us all.

The Professor, we must premise, had, like most people, no taste in furniture; he had the greatest fancy for placing the best among the poorest, the finest piece of crockery under an ancestral bed and over against it a sandy wash-bowl; a nicely cleaned servant's livery behind the cast-off clothes of his children, etc. Now, he always committed a breach of the peace against his wife by never coming home empty; he had always been buying something that was good for nothing; he had the weakness of innumerable men, of making believe he understood house-keeping as well as his wife, when he was a mere beginner. Things which one sees, for a long time, others doing, one comes to think at last that he can do himself. She had the weakness of numberless women, of flattering herself into the presumption that her lord and master was an ignoramus in house-keeping, and never could learn it, however much he might wish to. "Do I have any say about your books?" asked the very coarse-bodied Professoress. One could, therefore, at every furniture auction, or at every annual fair in a calendar of practical matters, prophesy, in connection with the wars of great lords, that here a little war would break out between the connubial potentate and the other hostile power; because the latter could not endure his commercial treaty; the married couple celebrated then its Olympic games of tongues and hands, and could mark off the divisions of time since their marriage by these Olympiads.

Still more! Our new Regent--as in Italy, the people get the palace of the deceased Doge or Pope gratis--let the furniture of his illustrious father be sold at auction for a song; he did it, as all Crown princes do, out of respect for him, so that the people might inherit a souvenir of the departed, as the Roman people did the gardens of Cæsar. The Professor proposed to himself, therefore, to inherit and purchase. He bid, therefore, for the benefit of the Captain, in whose chamber the commode, the looking-glass, and the chairs were miserable objects--not upon those three objects, but upon three to match them--upon two elegant bronze vases, with goats' heads and myrtle leaves, for the miserable commode; upon a straight-legged pier-table, with pointed feet, to go under the miserable looking-glass; upon a splendid bergére to stand between the miserable chairs. The whole was knocked off to him. His first word, as he went from the auction room into his own, was to his wife: "Is the Captain up stairs? I have bought some elegant things for him." At this she sang the first verse of her war-song, without having yet noticed a single article of his purchase. He did not name one of them to her; for he had the greatest misfortune of a husband, namely, contempt for his wife, just as she, on the contrary, took his part against all persons, even the best, only not against herself. During the unpacking of the purchases he responded to the first verse of the war-song, yet did not name an article; and no they merely kept up an antiphonal chanting. At last the goats' heads and pointed feet were set down in the house. Then broke loose the war-cry: "That is stupid, stupid, stupid! Ha! you stupid man, you! the stuff! the rubbish! where were your five senses to-day! I wont pay a doit (besides she was never treasurer), and so dear! But when children and fools go to market!"

Quite coolly he said: "Just see that no harm comes to them, and take them up to the Captain, my sweet!" She obeyed on the instant; but then went into his room and opened all the sluices of her roaring wrath. At a late period of this roaring he said, at last, threateningly: "You know, wife!..." Now the wind grew to a storm in her mouth. He was not the man to be carried away by anger or any other passion, but he was a genuine Stoic, and always himself; hence, it is easily explained how, as Epictetus and Seneca advise Stoics to make up for the forbidden inward anger by the outward show of the same, so as to get the upper hand of people, he too diligently availed himself of his show of anger, and quickly petrified his fist and threw this bunch as a fire-ball at those members of his spouse, which were devoid of light in the matter. This blunt Wilsonian conducting-knob of her anger was the first thing to draw forth from her the greatest spark of eloquence; and, in fact, it is in marriage as in the old Republics, which (according to Hume's observation), never produced greater orators than in the stormy times of war. He made the material thing a mere vehicle of the mental, and accompanied his hand with fragmentary extracts from the manual of Epictetus: "I am really quite in my senses," said he, "but you will scream altogether too loud if I don't strike into the midst of it." His carnal arm continued to move upon her. "I shall just keep on," he continued, "meanwhile, thank God that your husband has so much composure, that he can weigh everything he does!" But she never grew cold till he grew heated; this she discovered, at any time, by his growing dumb as Socrates, and arming and winging his hand with his night-cap suddenly snatched down from its nail. In proportion as his stinging sunny friendliness before the irruption of her thunderstorms seemed hot to her, in the same degree was his cloudiness that followed disagreeably cold; in short, both parties played before and after the battle reversed parts. This time her anger found a crisis of relief, and vented its whole force upon the head of him who was sitting under the goat-headed vases on the bergére--the Captain. The latter at the first gazette of this disgusting war had his winter-things packed up in Scheerau, and his summer things unpacked in Auenthal, and went--yes, actually went away.

But he came near staying. For the rest I do not wish to see this pugnacious pair I have depicted with their marriage-rings turned into explosive rings, too much despised by the more refined connubial world that never descends to fisticuffs; for, verily, the corrosive, poisonous words which ooze out from the refined married couple upon each other, drop by drop, the slow annoyance, drawing like a blister, wherewith they undertake to wound and cure each other, only drives the sore deeper under the skin, and makes not the surgeon indeed, but the doctor, necessary.

I will now explain why the Captain came near staying.

Hoppedizel had one afternoon at his house, beside the Captain, five others, the lawyer Kolb, the raft-inspector Peuschel, an old carmen-maker [or rhyme-smith], a court-chamber cleaner, and a court page; for what does the reader care about the surnames of these people? He first drew the lawyer aside and said to him: He must play a joke to day and drink to the other four gentlemen in colored water, which they would take for wine, while they would become fuddled with real wine. "Very good," said the lawyer; "they shall all have cause to remember the lawyer." The same thing the Professor repeated to the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker, etc.; all answered: "Very good! they shall all remember the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker," etc. Every one meant to make fools of the other four; the Professor had his eye on five--all were successful.

At evening five baskets of colored water were brought into the room; each man placed himself behind his little table, and screwed out the cork-stopper from the bottle of quasi-wine. The first flasks of bottled water were drained by the company in silence; true cunning must needs dictate to the pleasure-party or water-party this appearance of gradual intoxication.

But now the solar system began its drawing-of-water. "The wine might be stronger," every one said; and would fain deceive every one. The lawyer with rosy-red nose-button moistened his clay with more water (instead of spirit) than he had drunk or made or wrung from other eyes in his whole eternity a parte ante. A man who becomes so capable of holding water, as he is, that he can hardly stand straight for--soberness, makes it easily credible to his other tippling confederates that it arises from drunkenness; and all smiled very much when he laughed.

The raft-inspector Peuschel led a whole stream of water into his stomach, and made his blood-veins water-veins; but he was half vexed that he should be compelled to cheat the rest with his make-believe guzzling, and longed secretly for a real drunkenness instead of the pretended.

The chamber-cleaner actually macerated and soaked himself through and through with the colored water, and almost drowned out his Gallic malady--he guzzled so in his malicious pleasure.

The page, who almost burst his stomach with drinking, fared worse; three days after, he was carried off by an incontinentia urinæ. The porous carmen-maker was the only one through whom a whole colored deluge glided in and out without doing any harm; he looked round gaily and satirically, and watched for the moment when his next neighbors behind the four tables should fall down dead drunk.

A burning barn might have been saved by the toasts they drank in their whale-like throats.... Now came the time when every one who was in the secret of the joke must appear drunk. They discoursed and gabbled at each other with prancing, overbearing tongues. The page and the polisher actually stretched themselves out into the room like two felled trees, and their puffed-up paunches, the world was to fancy, lay like wine-sacks on their tressles. The man of office opened his mouth and shut his eyes--the carmen-maker imagined he should be doing it in the maddest and most plausible manner, if, in the first place, he should swear, like real drunkards, that he was sober; secondly, if he should collapse against the bed-posts in such a way as to get a real bruise. Fortunately he did in fact get a wound greater than his drunkenness, and was on the point, out of revenge, of breaking out with the information that he had made fools of the quartumvirate and drunk only water. The Professor also was just about to let the cat out of the bag and expose the wine and everything--the rest were going to do the same, and already began to laugh simultaneously in the anticipation: when meanwhile, unfortunately the raft-inspector, who had long been satiated, had stolen away to the polisher and thievishly by way of antidote and alleviative to his imitated wine, pledged himself in the pretended original edition of the same, out of the polisher's (or Frotteur's) cup.... there was water in that too as in his. Quick as lightning and half-foolishly he sipped the cups of all the water-gods; in all was water. Then out he came with the whole story--and the whole marine went flying round and hob-a-nobbing with each other, and each had to say seriously whether he was full and fou'.[^[28]] Unfortunately, the entire fraternity of practical jokers was sober. The Captain, who loved such pranks better than fastnight hens, transformed, from love of morals, the general pretense of drunkenness into pure sincerity, and carried out his plan by genuine wine. When, by and bye, the pentagon skipped homeward, and those five foolish virgins returned to their several abodes as five wise ones, though with an aqueous plethora, then he said: "Upon my soul, such a thing ought to be printed!" And in fact it is printed here.

I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes and tricks; and grimaces.

For all that, or for all that, the Captain liked him, because he saw him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one who had been the first to take him in--he would have done it out of honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another, e. g., the Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately, and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew, partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned, for one died by an apoplectic stroke."

But, as I said the Captain loved, and left him nevertheless.

FIFTEENTH SECTION.

The Fifteenth Section.

Before our departure I gave back to all, particularly the Resident Lady von Bouse, the music I had borrowed of them; and to her, who had lent me so much that came from Italy, I lent something still better from Germany, namely, my sister Philippina: the same is to help train there the little daughter of the Lady Resident, though, under the delicate fingers of so talented a dame, she will herself receive more training than she gives. Only may she there never transform her lively, tremulous, gay, and yet sensitive, heart into a coquettish one! May she lighten for her Laura (the name of the lady's daughter) the yoke of a coquettish breeding, inasmuch as the poor child continually pines under the glass-bell of the window, wedges her body under the bedclothes in two ounces of whalebone, squeezes her little hands again, even at night, into the casing of gloves, and trains her little head backward, with lead on her locks. As is well known, her mother, the Lady Resident, lives half a league from town, at Marienhof, in the so-called New Palace, adjoining an old one, which, I believe, is let.

... But my retinue in this biography is, I perceive, becoming swollen with every sheet by more and more personages, so that my driving and turning are made more and more disagreeable. I would rather have been a Diet of the Empire and had millions of subjects and income, than this plaguy heptagon of characters, which it is so hard to drive into the right sections, and in which I myself am the most cross-grained. For I, as mere biographer, have the aid neither of Imperial Chamber nor of Executive-posse against my heptagon; but were I an Imperial Diet they would soon give me many a--promise.

Around our parting-carriage in Scheerau crowded: the jolly coldness of the Professor--the busy scream of his lady stoic--the delicate smile of the Pestilentiary with the fitchew-tails--the good heart of his sonny, who could hardly by any lies be torn from Gustavus--and my own grateful remembrances of invisible hours, of beloved beings and of all my dear school-girls. Alas, that man here below must see so much pass away before he himself passes!

On the way Gustavus's weeping continued to sound in upon our pensive silence; but the old man, whose own heart, indeed, was melted, at last grew wild about it, and said to me: "I see more and more that the Moravian" (he meant the Genius) "has softened him to a milk-sop; if you, Mr. Tutor, don't make him a bit tough, I shall one day have him a lachrymose soldier, who will hardly be fit for a chaplain; for even he must many a time know how to bring out a good round oath."

He carried the Moravian in his head as far as the little town of Issig, where the following soliloquy went on beside our carriage: "I am an ass and a regular out and out villain, a miserable varlet. Oh, I am a rascal altogether, and a notorious, reprobate old hell-brand! Ought I not to be sawed in halves and roasted, the devil that I am, the blockhead and beast!" All this came from a school-boy, around whom all his schoolfellows swarmed and clapped. "He talks," (said my Patron) "like a Moravian beast, who runs himself down, in order to run all others down still more." But not in the least: it was a poor devil who was hungry and humorous, and for whom the whole school had contributed bread crumbs and apples, on condition that he would do them the favor to abuse himself outrageously....

... Lovely Auenthal! is thy snow already gone?

SIXTEENTH SECTION.

Educational Programme.

When I had set in order round my sitting-room and school-room my valuables (they were manuscripts) and my effects (the inventory of which was not over thirty lines deep), and my paternal and maternal property (that was I myself); when I had already previously taken three long strides to see the prospect from my window, which consisted of a windmill, the evening sun and a little starling's house on a birch tree, then I could forthwith be a ready-made tutor and needed only to begin. I could now look serious the whole week, and oblige my pupil to also--all my words could be weekly sermons, all my faces tables of the law. I had even two ways before me of being a fool: I could make an immortal soul decline, conjugate, memorize and analyze itself half dead in Latin--I could also dip and drown his young pineal gland so deeply in the higher sciences, that it should be quite bloated and puffed up with great draughts of logic, politics and statistics. I could accordingly (who should prevent it?) plane out the bony walls of his cranium to a dry bookcase, or press apart the living head into a profile-board, on which learned heads should be adumbrated; his heart, meanwhile, might be wrought over from being a high altar of nature to a wire-table of the Old Testament, from a celestial globe to a paternoster-globule of sanctimony--or, in fact, to a swimming-bladder of worldly policy; verily, I could be a ninny and make him a still greater one....

Thou precious one! thou confiding, friendly soul, that didst throw thyself with thy whole fate, with thy whole future, into my arms! Oh, I am already distressed that so much depends upon me!

Seeing, however, that just as much depends on the tutor of my future children, I will have printed for him here the following sheets of an Educational Programme, which he cannot take ill of me, because I really do not yet know the good man and do not mean him.

"My dear Mr. Tutor!

"Were I yours, you would certainly sit down and write out for me the following very good rules:

"Let Natural History be the sugar-cake which the schoolmaster shall put into the child's pocket in the first study hour, as a bait to lure him on; so, too, stories from history. Only let not history itself come as yet! What might not this lofty goddess, whose temple stands on nothing but graves, make of us, if she should then for the first time address us, when our head and heart were now open, and both understood her language of eternity--Fatherland, People, Constitution, Laws, Rome, Athens? As regards Mr. Schröckh, who appends thereto respectable literary history and pure orphan-house morality, I only beg that you will not, Mr. Tutor, cut out from his book the copper-plate engravings, and the English binding I also insist upon.

"Geography is a wholesome first course for the child's soul; arithmetic and geometry are also suitable for an early scientific breakfast; not because they teach to think, but because they do not teach it (the greatest arithmeticians and differentiators and mechanicians are often the shallowest philosophers), and because the exertion attending them does not weaken the nerves, as is proved by the case of revenue auditors and algebraists.

"But philosophy, or the effort of deep thinking, is deadly to children, or snaps off forever the too thin point of deep thought. To resolve virtue and religion into their first principles with children is equivalent to cutting away a man's breast and dissecting the heart, to show him how it beats. Philosophy is no bread-earning science, but mental broad itself, and a necessary: and one cannot teach either it or love; both, if taught too early, unman body and soul.

"It pleases me that you yourself explained you would send out French before Latin, speaking before rules of grammar (i. e., the go-cart before theories of muscular motion), and undertake the languages later, because they are apprehended more through the understanding than the memory. One reason why Latin is so difficult is that it comes on so early; in the fifteenth year one can do therein, with a finger, what at an earlier period required a whole hand.

"It is abominable that even now our children have to read and sit and make the fundament the underpinning and base of their education. The book of instruction does not make good to them the place of the instructor, nor the amusing one that of more wholesome play. Poetry is for a beardless age too unintelligible and unwholesome; the teacher who reads a lecture must be a miserable one, if he does not far more emphatically speak. In short, no children's books!

"In a pedagogical album we should both write: Useless censure is worse than no censure at all. Faults which age takes away let not the teacher undertake to, who has more lasting ones to combat, etc. Let their catechism be Plutarch and Feddersen (only without his miserable style); i. e., no moralities, but narratives with a moral effect--and moreover, at no stated hour, but at the right one, so that the brains of my children may not be a spelling-school of morals, but their heart may become an illuminated Rotunda[^[29]] of virtue.

"Since a purblind, narrow, anxious propriety of behavior is the most stupid and unnatural, accordingly you teach the children the best by not enjoining upon them any: by nature they respect neither silver stars nor silver heads--do not wean them to any such.

"My greatest prayer is--which I have had printed many years beforehand--that you be the most jocose man in my house; merriment makes all fields of knowledge for children fields of sugar-cane. Mine must, while with you, have full liberty to jest, talk, sit at their good pleasure. We grown people, reasonable as we are, could not stand the abominable school-confinement of our offspring a week; and yet we expect it of them, with their brains and veins busy as swarming ant-hills. In brief: Is childhood, then, only the painful preparation-day for the Sunday enjoyment of later age, or is it not rather itself a Sabbath eve, which brings its own joys? Ah, if we in this empty, drizzling life do not regard every means as a nearer end (as well as every end a more distant means), what then do we find here below? Your principal (an abominable word) took as much pleasure in his betrothal as in his wedding.

"Playful instruction does not mean sparing and saving the child effort, but awakening in him a passion which shall compel and lighten for him the hardest. Now to this end no lugubrious passions are at all serviceable--e. g., fear of censure, of punishment, etc.--but only joyous ones; in play every girl in Scheerau would learn Arabic, if her lover wrote to her in no other language than in that synonymous one. Hope of praise (the praise of external distinctions alone excepted) is what harms children far less than censure, and something to which no child, least of all the best ones, can grow obdurate. I will tell you here what my own tutor made use of as an educational espalier: he stitched for himself a cipher-book; in this he gave each member of his lyceum (nineteen in all) for every task a large or small number; these numbers when they had reached a certain fixed sum, gained a letter of nobility or certificate of diligence, whereupon one took his praise home with him. Since rewards are ineffectual when they come too often or only from afar, accordingly he, in this ingenious manner constructed the way to the remote reward out of daily little ones. We could, moreover, save up our numbers; and nothing so strongly holds children to diligence as a growing property (or ciphers or of writing-books). The striking out of such numbers was a punishment. He thereby made us all so diligent, me particularly, that a few years after I was able to write a biography, which is even now being read.

"Never talk with my darlings briefly or abstractly, but in the concrete, and make your narratives as explicit and circumstantial as Voss does his Idyls.

"Thus have I used the molding and modeling tool upon my Gustavus, not, assuredly, to adjust him to the biography of him which I was composing, but to fit him for life itself; but deuce take the heart of a man, I say, who will not do for his own children what he did for another's.

"My daughters, on the other hand, worthy Sir Tutor, the elder as well as the younger, I do not commit to you for the same school-hour--girls might as well share with boys the same dormitory as the same school-room--in fact I would have for them no school-hours at all. A tutor, in order to know how to train girls, must (as you know) have so much knowledge of the world, so much knowledge of woman, so much wit, so much flexibility of humor with so much firmness;--meanwhile mine are trained by a very clever governess--household labor under the eye of a cultured mother.

"Before closing these secret instructions, I further remark that they are wholly useless--first, for you, because a man of genius even with any other method whatever is still omnipotent; secondly, for a clumsy head, because such a one, let him do what he will, will always exhaust children's mental powers as an old bedfellow does the bodily powers of a younger. In fact, I have sent forward this pedagogical Swabian code and mirror into the world long before I do my children--consequently not for you at all, but for a book."

Namely, for this one.

By way of showing my principal what I had done in education, I said as follows: "The Superintendent in Upper Scheerau has a setter named Hetz, which he would not give for a menagerie of lap-dogs. Now, one would think that, as the man has church-children, children of his own and wines and East India fowls enough, he would be content; but no: Hetz does not allow it. For so soon as the soup smokes on the table, Hetz begins cruising round the table, jumps up,--his snout then lies on a water-level with the leg of venison--and pecks and pokes so with his nose at every knee, particularly at the official, that the man, for his part, gobbles away as in a purgatory and frequently does not know whether he is eating sugar or salt. It did not relieve him at all that he often himself barked at the dog; but at the next meal, from forgetfulness or fury, he hit the pest with a bone which he flung at him. This single bone spoiled the whole dog. For the shepherd of souls, I fear, there is no longer any help, till Hetz, who will not change himself, in some way goes out of the world. Me, on the contrary, Hetz always treats with reason and forbearance. Why? So long as I ate at that table I never gave Hetz a morsel, in a single instance. With Hetzes and humans firmness is omnipotent. Whoso cannot educate a dog, Mr. Captain, neither can he educate a child. I would try tutors who would eat my bread, by no other touchstone than this: that they should tame for me squirrels and mice; whoever understood this best should be admitted, e. g., Wildau, for his bee-taming." But my gracious godfather never laughed heartily at my jests or Fenk's; on the other hand at one of Hoppedizel's he would laugh immoderately, and yet he loves both of us better.

When I shall have rescued in an extra sheet two more educational idiosyncrasies--one of which is that I exercised the wit of my pupil as strongly as his understanding; the second, that I went over with him only authors from the ages of the baser metals;--then we will go on again with his life.

EXTRA-LEAF.

Why I Allow My Gustavus Wit and Corrupt Authors and Forbid Him The Classics, I Mean Greek and Roman.

I must first show, in three words, or pages, that and why the study of the ancients is declining,[^[30]] and secondly, that it is no great matter.

We have now, as is well known, come out of the philological centuries, when nothing but Latin was used at altars, in pulpits, on paper or in thinking, and when it knit together all learned dressing-gowns and night-caps from Ireland to Sicily into one confederacy; when it constituted the state language and often the language of conversation in the great world, when one could not be a scholar without carrying in his head an inventory of all Greek and Roman household furniture, and a bill of fare and washing schedule of those classic people. Now-a-days our Latin is German to that of a Camerarius, who therefore would not have found it necessary to compose his Smalcaldic war in Greek; at the present day a sermon is seldom written in Latin, not to say in Greek, as once, and therefore cannot be translated, as once, into Latin, but merely into German. In our days no lady squeezes her powdered and mitred head through the narrow classic collar, unless it be the daughters of Hermes. This was known to my readers longer ago than to me, because I am younger--just as the present improved reviewing, translating and interpreting of the ancients is well known to both of us. Only the number of their admirers does not keep pace with the worth of them; all our branches of knowledge share now-a-days among themselves a universal monarchy over all readers; but the ancients sit alone with their few philological vassals on a rock-of-San-Marino. There are now none but Polyhistors who have read everything else, but not the ancients.

Taste for the spirit of the ancients must grow dull, as well as for their speech. I do not assert that in the classic parrot-centuries this spirit was more truly felt than now; for Vossius hung upon Lucan, Lipsius on Seneca, Casaubon on Persius; I do not say that in those days a Faust, an Iphigenia, a Messiah, a Damocles, were written, as now. But I speak of the present taste of the people, not of the men of genius.

If the spirit of the ancients consisted in their firm, steady step to the object, in their hatred of a double, three-fold finery of ruffles, in a certain childlike sincerity; then it must be growing always easier for us to feel that spirit and harder for us to breathe it in our work; with every century our style must betray an inspection, circumspection and retrospection that increases with the increase of our learning; the fullness of our composition must hinder its roundness; we refine finery, bind[^[31]] the binding and draw an overcoat over the overcoat; we must needs decompose the white sunbeam of truth, as it no longer strikes us for the first time, into colors, and whereas the ancients were prodigal of words and thoughts we are penurious with both. Still it is better to be an instrument of six octaves, whose tones easily sound impurely and run into each other, than a monochord, whose only string is harder to get out of tune; and it were just as bad if every one, as if no one, wrote like Monboddo.

With our unfruitfulness in works after the old style, the taste for these works proportionately increases. The ancients felt the worth of the ancients--not at all; and their simplicity is enjoyed by those only who cannot attain it: by ourselves. For this reason, I think the Greek simplicity differs from that of the Orientals, savages and children[^[32]] only in the higher talent by which the serene Greek climate caused that simplicity to be distinguished. That is the inborn, not the acquired. The artificial, acquired simplicity is an effect of culture and taste; the men of the 18th century have to wade up to this Alpine source through marshes and torrents; but one who is up there by its side never more forsakes it, and only peoples, not individuals, can degenerate from the taste of a Monboddo to that of a Balzac. This acquired taste, which the youthful genius always attacks and the elder mostly acknowledges, must from Fair to Fair by practice upon all that is beautiful grow in the case of individuals more and more keen and sensitive; but nations themselves fall away every century farther and farther from the Graces, who, like the Homeric Gods, hide themselves in clouds. The ancients therefore could no more feel the natural simplicity of their productions, than the child or the savage does that of his. The pure, simple manners of an Alpherd or a Tyrôlese are matter of admiration neither to their own possessor nor to his compatriot, but only to the refined count which cannot attain to them; and if the great folk of the Romans enjoyed the sports of naked children, with which they adorned their chambers, it was the great folk but not the children, who had the enjoyment and the taste. The ancients, therefore, wrote with an involuntary taste, without reading with the same--as authors of genius to-day, e. g., Hamann, read with far more taste than they write--hence these fever-pustules and rash-eruptions on the otherwise healthy children of a Plato, an Æschylus, even a Cicero; hence the Athenians clapped no orators more than the turners of antitheses and the Romans none more than the punsters. For the immoderate admiration of Shakespeare they wanted nothing but Shakespeare himself. For that very reason these nations could, like the child, degenerate from natural simplicity to polished, varnished witticisms.

Secondly, I promised to affirm on three pages that the neglect of the ancients does little harm. For of what use, then, is the cultivation of them? They are, like virtue, far less felt and enjoyed than is generally professed.[^[33]] The enjoyment of them is the truest nine-proof of the best taste; but this best taste presupposes such an intellectual appreciation of all kinds of beauty, such a pure and fair symmetry of all inner faculties, that not merely Home finds taste irreconcilable with a bad heart, but I also know nothing--next to Genius, which always attains it after the discharge of its intellectual exuberance--more rare than this very perfection of taste. O ye Conrectors and Gymnasiarchs, you who moan and weep over the depreciation of the ancients, if you still had eyes, they would weep over your appreciation! Oh, it requires other hearts and spiritual wings (not mere lung-wings) than belong to your pedagogic bodies to discern why the ancients called Plato the divine, why Sophocles is great and the Anthologists are noble! The ancients were men, not literati. What are you? And what do you get from them?...

Copiam vocabulorum.--In the Middle Ages every least benefit derived from the ancients was great; but now, in the eighteenth century, when all nations have hewn a gradus ad Parnassum in the granite of the Muses, two or three steps more or less make very little difference. Have, then, modern nations not written in the ancient taste? Were it so, then, at any rate, models, which have not multiplied themselves at all in copies, might easily be spared. But it is not even so, and an Omar-like conflagration of all the ancients could only snatch from us a little more than if the still extant autumnal-flora of a few Greek temples and other ruins were swept away; we should still possess houses in the Greek taste. The models themselves surely wrote without models, and the statue of Polycletes was fashioned after the statue of a Polycletes. Despite the study of the ancient writings, the poetic and creative power once lay in Germany, and still lies in Italy, on the sick bed.

Whoever, like Heyne, will make the ancients necessary to the formal cultivation of the soul, such a one forgets that any language is equal to that, and that a more unlike language, as the Oriental, can do it still better, and that this cultivation sometimes costs us as dear as many a Baron finds his French. The Greeks and Romans became Greeks and Romans without the formal cultivation of Greek and Latin authors--they became so through government and climate.

It is unfortunate for the finest productions of the human mind that their fineness is rubbed off under the hands of the pupils of the First, Second and Third Classes; that the Heads of Schools can imagine that a better edition or better nominal and scientific explanations should put the young gynmasiasts into a better position to appreciate the sublime classic ruins than an improved and corrected edition of Shakespeare and the appended romances with notes would enable a schoolman or a Frenchman to open his eyes before this English Genius--that these same Heads accordingly imagine that nothing keeps a eunuch or infant cold to the charms of a Cleopatra except the wrappages of these charms, and that the Heads are nowise behind me and nature.[^[34]]

For Nature trains our taste through prominent beauties for finer ones. The youth prefers wit to sentiment, bombast to sense, Lucan to Virgil, the French to the ancients. At bottom this taste of the minor is in one respect not far out of the way, namely, that it feels certain minor beauties more strongly than we, but the flaws bound up with them and the higher charms more feebly than any of us; for we should only be so much the more perfect, if at the same time with our present feeling for the Greek epigram we could combine our lost youthful enthusiasm for the French. One should therefore let the youth satisfy himself with these dainties, as the confectioner does his apprentice with the other kind, so long, till he shall become sated with them and hungry for higher food. But now-a-days, inversely, he translates himself to satiety from the ancients, and forms and spices with them his taste for the moderns. In our authorial world we see the sad result; that teachers begin at the end and undertake, by means of writers who properly only give the tenderest, best taste the last finish, to carve that of the gymnasiast out of the rough, and so follow neither nature nor me.

The Head Masters are apprehensive, to be sure, that "the young people might thereby get more wit into their heads than is proper, if one should read Seneca, epigrams and corrupt authors." My first answer is that the constitution of the German is robust and healthy enough to be less exposed to the spotted fever of wit than other peoples: e. g., the witty book "On Marriage" or the writings of Hamann, we compensate for by a thousand pure works which have no wit in them. I have of often thought, therefore, just as the German knows little of his superior merit, so, too, he knows nothing of this one, that he has no superfluous wit, although the reviewers often enough reproach me and the romancers with this superfluity. But I and these authors demand impartial judges on the subject. Even these otherwise insignificant reviewers themselves are, to their honor, so little like a Seneca or a Rousseau, both of whom condemned, combatted, and yet affected the witty style, that they strictly rebuke the fault of wit in others, and happily avoid it themselves.

My second answer goes deeper: before the body of man is developed, every artificial development of the soul is injurious to him; philosophical straining of the understanding, poetic exertion of the fancy, unsettle the youthful powers themselves, and others too. Only the development of wit, which, in the case of children, is so little thought of, is the most harmless--because it works only in light, fugitive effects;--the most beneficial--because it sets the new wheel-work of ideas into quicker and quicker motion--because, through invention, it imparts interest and control over one's ideas--because that of others and one's own (wit) in these early years charms us most with its brilliancy. Why have we so few inventions, and so many scholars in whose heads lie mere immovable goods, and the ideas of every science dwell secluded from each other club-wise in convents, so that, when a man writes on one science, he never thinks of anything that he knows in another? Merely because children are taught ideas more than the handling of ideas, and because in school their thoughts have to be fixed as immovably as their fundaments.

One should imitate Schlötzer's hand in history and other sciences. I accustomed my Gustavus to hear, to understand and thereby to invent for himself, analogies from different sciences, e. g., All things great or weighty move slowly; hence the Oriental Princes do not walk at all--nor the Dalai Lama; the Sun--the Sea-crab--wise Greeks (according to Winkelmann) walked slowly--so does the hour-hand--the ocean--the clouds in fair weather--move slowly. Or; In winter, men, the earth, the pendulum, go slower. Or; The following were kept secret,--the name of Jehovah--of Oriental Princes--of Rome and its patron Deity--the Sybilline books--the first early Christian Bible, the Catholic, the Veda, etc. It is indescribable what pliability of all ideas is thereby communicated to children's minds. Of course the various kinds of knowledge must be there first, which one would thus associate. But enough! the pedant neither approves nor understands me; and the better teacher says himself: enough!

SEVENTEENTH SECTION.

Holy Supper.--Succeeding Love-feast and Kiss of Love.

Oh, beloved Gustavus! the wintered days of our love burst forth and bloom again from my ink-stand, as I delineate them! Hast thou, reader, ever had a spring-time of life, and does its image still hang in thy memory; then lay it, in the winter-month of life, to thy warm bosom and give its colors life, as the heating of the stove discloses and animates its invisible spring-pictures--and then think of thy flowery days, while I depict one.... Our four walls were the railings of a richer paradise than any pleasure park exhibits, the cherry tree at our window was our Dessian School-grove[^[35]] and Kindergarten, and two human beings were happy, although one commanded and the other obeyed. The machinery of praise, which was so emphatically extolled in the regulations for my tutor, I laid aside, because it was not applicable to one, but to a whole school; my chain-pump-work was his love for me. Children love so easily, so heartily; how poorly must he manage who makes them hate him! On the scale of my punitory Carolina or Theresiana--instead of the usual pedagogic disgraces and corporal inflictions--stood coldness--a mournful look--a mournful reproof--and, severest of all, the threat of going away. Children like Gustavus, of tender heart, and of a fancy that flutters at every breath of wind, are easily diverted and directed; but at the same time a single false twitch at the rein will confuse and bring them to a stand-still forever. Especially are the honeymoon weeks of such an education as dangerous as those after marriage to a woman of fine feelings, with whom a single cacochymic[^[36]] afternoon is not to be effaced again by any subsequent seasons of day or year. I will just confess: on such a sensitive woman's account was I made tutor. As women (so it ran in my mind) have, in a striking degree, all the perfections of children--their faults somewhat less:--accordingly a man, who knows how to attach and fasten his web to the widely diverging boughs of childhood, i. e., who can adapt himself to a child, cannot possibly fare so ill as others when he--marries.

Where censure would hurt the child's sense of honor and self-respect, there I suppressed it, in order to teach my colleagues round about by example, that the sense of honor and character which our days do not sufficiently educate, is the best thing in man--that all other feelings, even the noblest, let him fall out of their arms at hours when the sentiment of honor holds him up in its own--that among men whose principles are silent and whose passions scream into each other's ears, their sense of honor alone imparts to the friend, the creditor and the beloved an iron security.