20. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter from Emanuel.—Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.—Walk to St. Luna.
"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as if it were the form of a stranger.—Oh, when man has nothing more to love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for, among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when, instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in his cold grief."
Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,—Marie,—whose form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda, whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!—my female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,—laugh not at my good hero, who is none precisely where the strength of the soul becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever has the sympathetic nerve of life—love—tied up or cut asunder, can well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man lose more patiently than fellow-men."
And yet at evening an accident—namely, a letter—made all his sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from Emanuel—not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him—arrived.
"My ever-loved one!
"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his heart!'
"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me, which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,—this and the coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.
"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden the appearance of a new thicket.—
"So ascends the spirit even here in this dark life, as the barometer ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the brighter life even under the clouds.
"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.—In that night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint the summer picture.
"O my son!—I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is; thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it, still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of hope. O thou whom I so love, my sister also will so love thee; and when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in his heart.
"Emanuel."
* * *
Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again, and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness, exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest thought,—to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not to force her to court...
The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking, Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,—then observed,—then assumed,—then seen,—then interpreted,—then hoped,—then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men, he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda a service,—namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected upon his determination to see her again.—Feelest thou, haply, Victor, that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only prologues to the Second Act?
But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true answer:—"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.—Accidentally Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market, and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship, suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the most poisonous broths?—As, however, the magic image generally faded in one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature, the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day before yesterday missed each other.
"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing such a reference to his Victor.
The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.
"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "this week I have to do cabinet-service, but I can next week."
And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.—So many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he, whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.—He wanted at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing, and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so wretchedly,—for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his serious ones always miscarried,—that even Flamin heard him out, and dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days, and—Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
There was a fix.—Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a singular sangfroid, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off again without a single—hope.
Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,—better one disaster than ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above than from below upward!—
Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the Latreia towards a prince, the Douleia towards his minister, and the Hyperdouleia towards his w—, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do what I can."
Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,—i. e. with so much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,—in short, he found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable disposition towards him so well grounded,—that he could have selected no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise her against Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him; still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his daughter deserved rather to have a court than to adorn one; nay, that he deserved at most in the whole matter—an excuse, as Clotilda would certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court; in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother, for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for—words. She said, a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future than to the past?—The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less (but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure. Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.—He would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness), who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday carmen, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her future prison-fever.—But for the vacant freehold of his heart this very vexation was wholesome....
If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear friend, let him take it twice.—The first we all understand, as a matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself with flames into the tender soul; but then he will never be able to forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a second farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate emotions admit no dal segno[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation), where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly, collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the Dog-Post-Days....
—Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing cold!"—"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou meanest the reader and the author."—Already, while I still sit over the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:—
1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the sting tears out, and is left behind.
2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents and soldiers!
3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up into little ones; and as
4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.
5. Man takes his suffering for that of humanity, as the bees take the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again, for rain, and stay in-doors.
6. But he commits daily a lesser error: he regards as an eternity (that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama—of Existence) at first his present hour,—then his youth,—then his life,—then his century,—then the duration of the globe,—then that of the sun,—then that of the heavens,—then (this is the least error) time itself....
7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two blank bookbinder's leaves,—childhood and old age; and so, too, in the Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.
FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.
Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets.
K.
Cold.[227]—In our age decrease of stoicism and increase of egotism are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, mountains wear away, and glaciers increase.
L.
Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.—I still always adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which I raise upon my evening star [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole capital upon a complete collection of all German prefaces and titles that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who do not care to read the book itself when they review it.
That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead capital in my house, I shall employ it—if I do not change my mind—in getting the bookbinder to publish the heavier German masterpieces,—e. g. Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,—likewise the better satirical and philosophical ones, in a lighter ladies' edition, which shall consist wholly of so-called puzzle-volumes, which have no book slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which—because the hard stone-fruit is already shelled out, and there is nothing inside—they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. Allwill's correspondence—a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's, which I have had blown out by the bookbinder in this manner, because most of the fair readers are too cold to hatch it—is now quite light. But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I fear the trade would cry out about piracy.—A happy man were I, if the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228] they would there, where often only the titles of works—and of the stupidest, into the bargain—are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.
—Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people, who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and circulate the covers of the best German journals,—which latter are often annexed as curiosa even to the capsules, and fill them out.... Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.
M.
Maidens.—Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly, if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like pastel-pictures, under window-glass—because everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves—until they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart is neither solitude,—which leads only to an untried innocence,[229] that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite,—nor society, nor hard labor,—otherwise no country girl would ever fall,—nor good teachings,—for these are to be had in every mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.
N.
Names of the Great.[230]—When I see, as I do, how they scatter their productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces (children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews, then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be acknowledged by the Prince as genuine; whereas their supernatural [or extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people into it as out of it secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to pronounce, such parents speak to him last,—their name. Methinks they follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with vingt-quatre,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."
O.
Ostracism.—It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment. Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar public educational institution,—namely, banishment,—squander it often upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore—with the design of making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of another—drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have for the man of merit, and an honest man—e. g. a Bahrdt[232]—is almost ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the way[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees, having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?—Not even in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often eccentric merits,—although eccentric men fall back into the truth, as comets do into the sun, as fuel,—make his calculations upon being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in statues and pictures, hung up in effigy in a thick stone frame.... Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.
P.
Philosophy.—Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute—not so much think as—write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere letters, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole technical words, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.—Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all abstract words are pictures, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his images, but in consequence of the new ideas which through them he would communicate to us.
I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant—otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton—has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together—namely, ninety-six—who could bear the name of Kant,—that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics—thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister—one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain one-sidedness of view into all heads,—especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more one-sidedness, precisely as he has the more insight,—still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.
Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a general knowledge of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,—such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,—a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,—and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
Q (see K).
R.
Reviewers.—An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the existence of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its value; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public catalogues raisonnés of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its individuality, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual from the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form one.—Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical Fauna and Flora of the first five tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.—But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,—why talk a whole intercalary day?
S.
Stripes.—"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."—Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?—It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not aggravates, but itself creates, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of the will."
T.
Trouble, Tribulation.—Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which announce to me that Nature makes only thorn-hedges, but men crowns of thorns, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or feet.
21. DOG-POST-DAY.
Victor's Professional Visits.—Concerning Houses full of Daughters.—The Two Fools.—The Carrousel.
The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural false masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the genuine tasteful show of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with paper clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the true ones.—
"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own—for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh—very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,—nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess—unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love—at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of younger pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,—of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,—unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.
He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. Pringle and Schmucker, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.
"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.
Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess. Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,—a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.
What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.—
He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make endurable and enduring,—the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last—though not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened—he told her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy (empressement) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but only that he had—sent him to her.
Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many beatifications and as many canonizations (two contrarieties on this earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a ventriloquist, and gives his voice the sound of another's.
When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything, least of all of thy pride or another's love,—oh, I know what it is to win none,"—nevertheless he remained (in his opinion) cold before her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than usual.
—Many people would sooner live without houses than without building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned thus:—"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in her condition of singleness, he can, according to his vow, still love with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess, incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world and everything that may benumb its wounds!
With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half an—