This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which intoxicated me still better,—a package of letters. Savans, lovers, people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters; business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical department, but then what flattery!)—that every one who possessed a life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,—that it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness, only then bring up the rear with the final flourish, that modesty forbids them to say more, when they have already said everything that modesty can forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"—he writes more copiously, but I abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed beast of a rat,—"to establish everything for me by documentary evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not wholly to be trusted,—in time he will explain everything to me,—for this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof, but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;—accordingly the epistolary Spitz will regularly swim back and forth as a poste aux ânes,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman; and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself Knef, "shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that, instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which, again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere Declinatorium[24] of our perpetual horizontal deviations from the cold pole of truth, and an Inclinatorium[25] of our vertical ones from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy, that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,' and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires, because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down as among the duties of medisance, and so pardon them, because they hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their incognito is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has; he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them; and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility, pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this historical drama—especially as he plays only the prompter—is the—Dog. Jean Paul."
I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this History to the learned world or not.
But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
... Spitzius Hofmann is the name of the dog; he was the rat, and was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him to-day—for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my writing—glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty, I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his repeating-watch,—the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the sheets,—the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all to him;—he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons, but charms,—like the apothecaries, who draw at once medicines and aqua vitæ,—so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes have, and vice versâ; and as this biography is set to music, because Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as if I read the work;—the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of its illuminated circle of waves before my island,—I stand on the best footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;—everything is ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body blooms, my mind produces,—and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death may lay under my roots,—nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing joyfully—thou good destiny!—my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart, while contemplating these leaves, may forget, in short, gentle dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings—O, why is a man sometimes so happy?
For this reason: because he is sometimes a littérateur. As often as Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special map the little life-stream of a literatus, which runs over some lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus: "Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an inkhorn,—his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer) the Easter-fair,—his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a bookcase,—and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
flowerstart
Antediluvian History.—Victor's Plan of Life.
At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What is your name?—your character?—your business?"
The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius—i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name—had, in his younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which cost him but a single don gratuit from his subjects, and he succored and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a day, but seldom a night, without making others, and consequently being themselves, happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the Monsieur, or Mosye: these names were probably meant to allude to Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure, sensual and somewhat feeble, but—except where he feared—extremely philanthropic.
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion. What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court. Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers—from an excessive deference to political and domestic relations—throw an unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship, twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single, tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed—by the lord, whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual Old Man of the Mountain as he at once younger and more smooth.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit. Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something to his taste, for the reason that he had found what was still more so in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign, so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall happily get back again to our St. Luna.
A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper, held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again, he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself a conscientia dubia, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it, he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words, the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off only from the unmarried sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns, that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain wholly from the simple form.
It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now increased love for his four grand dukes or little dukes in Gaul stood to the fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London, because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently), after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian, the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more—to be found there.
Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante (his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's votum made him to the husbands of his court, and harmless to the fathers, nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining wall-crown (corona muralis) as with a joujou, and with its brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over presently, say I.
When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his adoption,—namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High Chamberlain was—and no one minded it less than Horion—an ardent friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him (as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for himself,—namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor, however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le Baut by a threefold ligament,—by gratitude, son, and wife; his Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out plan, which she had hitherto regarded as an indulgent confidence. All the nobility and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and, pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his Lordship's.
Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr. Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice, which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms. January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent, because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once watchful and tame. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate, remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must be equal in order to resist their will; and any one who would play the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial syndic.
With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,—his letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]—and now, when he actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise the whole court that he should come back well.
Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise, ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account to add this much more:—
The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it. Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in fact he is only a country pastor.
From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher, accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift, which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her Flamin—in order to be at all events half a Briton—stay behind in the society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish friendship. The same training hand—Dahore was the name of the teacher—reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story goes straight forward again.
His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to appear, and we all praise it. Not coldness, but cooling-off, is the greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a smoother form: for that very reason has Nature—just as they warm the mould for statuary metal—poured his soul into an ardent body.
He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind. His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will be hurled down."
"No, I am to be hurled down first (to express myself in thy fashion),—but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage to interrupt other people like fools,—for my absence is just what they want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion. Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank, their mental structure, and their frequent separation.—
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess—"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without children, as Spitz says.)
"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him; and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside, what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's. "Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary, thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain—" Then, with full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them. The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the happy man labor for the unhappy."
He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure": whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know not how to stir or open anything—not excepting their hearts—but only their shell, to draw something in ..."
"I have not interrupted thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still for a moment.
"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah! around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand eyes?"
Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,—foolish,—that is, I mean—contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age. Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah! but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man—dried up by the intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get well."
Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred his blood and shaken his heart.
And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
"I have a request for my Flamin."
"What is it?" said his Lordship.
"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier, take the pen."
The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a new question.
His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
rivetstart
Sowing-Day of Joys.—Watch-Tower.—Fraternization of the Heart!
The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's, rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life, turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for animals—consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are reconciled—and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the general uproar, and introduced themselves, and—which no ambassador would have done—waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him. Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one.... Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other things to talk about." But no quite other things came. Everybody wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34] of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty? Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved faces,—those boyish years held a dark mirror in their hands, in which the glimmering perspective of his childish years ran backward; and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of Dahore, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he deserved it,—a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,—the Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner; but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any appetite,—which joy takes away more than grief,—except the three regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,—that is, into the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the reading-societies in a body to the immovable feast of the 4th of May, the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was, and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone, distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother. Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was, indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the company he kept,—namely, he went roving round with a young page, one Matthieu, son of the Minister Von Schleunes, a dissolute, universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer, who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow. Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me. Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite wrongly,—namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons (enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his comic salt, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A bon-mot is to them a dictum probans; a pasquin, a magister sententiarum; and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow these.
In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon. Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental excitements,—e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than a lamb.
Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence. Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden, whose memorabilia and curiosa are so edifying that the correferent[35] of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express, portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes; Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or Glycyrrhiza vulgaris (liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a vacant place and almanac royal among squashes and Stettin-apples, round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out, which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove away the answer.
Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood—one had only to leap the brook—a hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the people—not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the feeling of minorites—might up there look round them a little. One could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships. On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it melted away before it burned out.
Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St. Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of gravamina (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats. All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below by the organ-blower loci, who was valet-de-place of the village, and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The churl was deaf. He had in his mouchoir de Vénus—the handkerchief is, with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a reviewer—to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse, and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days; and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends. The case was this: Clotilda, Le Baut's only daughter by his first wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
"Do you take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very beautiful."
"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care not to take care."
"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong; but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages. "The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off again."
A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his love,—that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this point also.
"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and breast."
A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the peculiarities of their sex.
"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand Inquisitress.
"She—" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the fulness of glowing dreams. "She, of course—" he continued. "I pledge my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least, moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his poples or knee-joint grow lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very best of her sex,—for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,—that is, in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a male one; and, in case he were that,...
"I am a stupid drawing, an ambe, a double number, I say, and absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall still be on the look-out for the Quinterne.... And here let me ask, What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now, if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,—which, to be sure, without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,—I should not be indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses and pas, and both with their traditional pedes (or feet); I should bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether, which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one? What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight gratial and don gratuit, if thereby a creature was to be obtained who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted); who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain standing through the whole flying opera buffa and seria[39] of life,—so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least, when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and the landscape around—him melted away to a broad shadow, and he himself, too, that I might at least behold both shadowy hands," (one of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim—" (Checking himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in one of his!"
As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back with him,—not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead there,—with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor, however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all the seven consecrations, and praised her so much—perhaps also because she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side—that Victor could have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added, as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name (C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that panted to pour themselves out into each other.
Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being, and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt, down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ... Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again, there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity, around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these perishable integuments.
Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt never disturb me in my love to thee."
"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will gladly swear to thee again to-day."
"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and despair."
"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up hither when we can no longer be reconciled,—O, it pains me, too, Victor!—up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down and die!"
"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything happened, then?"
"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to thee all."
But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace; and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner and outer heavens.
At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her; that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned, galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation between them, so long as he took the juristic instead of the military road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken in his letters to Victor was just this,—that he would repeat all to his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities catches palpitations, was the chief reason.—Victor rejoiced that he could give his feelings the best language,—namely, action, and assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins—that ever-burning, intertwined name of friendship—glimmered in the west, beckoning upward out of an earthly eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their right....
There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,—because they know not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self (which latter cannot at once be the source and the object of love),—something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the virtue which in ourselves we only approve, and not till we see it in others can love.
Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as they are by north winds,—who would fain press to their bosoms the noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy earthly mask hangs,—and who fall, one after another, into graves into which the mourned draw their mourners?