Nothing.
As this supplement to a little Post-Day was too small, I kept waiting for the dog and for new biographical pipe-clay and dough.—Since, however, the post-aux-chiens still delays, I will just score down the few cat-tones which I left out of the concert of love in the former chapter. It is nothing but vexatious stuff that I have still to supply here, and just these creaking tones may topple down again a new avalanche and institute new mischief. It is simply stupid that in this way the book is done, and yet not done, since the dog of a—dog is quite unexpectedly out of the way, like snuff.
The step-mother, the Chamberlain's lady, who has been long since banished the country by the biographical conjurer of spirits and bodies out of these leaves, had, on the advent of her Ladyship, from a very natural antipathy, marched off to a little country-seat. Speed on; besides, thou art not my Amancebada![195]—Matthieu had, in the former chapter, conformably to his old audacity, stayed awhile among none but antagonists of his dark nature, and was sitting in the hall as the happy procession marched in from the garden. He knew not yet that the courtier Victor was in reality nothing but a mere, flat parson's son. At first he continued to carry on the antique joke of his declaration of love to Agatha, and set the Parson up to compliments and addresses of thanks for the services which he had rendered all to-day. But when he found there was too much indifference to his cold malice, he took away from his contempt its ambiguity. In fact, his heart was sincere, and rather made itself out more malicious, than more virtuous, than it was; he hated a dissimulation, whereby many a courtling easily gives himself that look of the virtuous man, which is best to be explained by Lavater's observation, that the angry person transfers to his own face the looks of the one whom he hates.
At last, Matthieu guessed the secrets, and the Parson ratified his guess. Such a water for his saw-mill, on which he cut men straight for his throne-scaffolding, had never before flowed in upon him.—If he represents to the Prince this falsehood, this new, terrible, abominable fraud, which his Lordship has played upon him, then—he concludes—must January go beside himself with amazement at Lord Horion's lies and at Matthieu's truths.—Now, he held it for his duty to smile, indeed, but no more with malicious pleasure, like Mat, but with a regular contemptuousness, as a court-vassal should; he felt, too, how much beneath his dignity it was to let himself any longer be twisted into this citizenly quodlibet, without at least making a fool of it. He went accordingly,—for the sake of throwing out the news from his seed-apron into good ground,—after a short but sincere congratulation upon the marriage, the very same night back to the court,—and the Devil, following him as attendant blackamoor, decorously brought up the rear.
I wish the villain would never step into my biographical writing-chamber and casa santa again; he is conscious of so many immoral resources, that, in the feeling of strength they impart to him, he actually plays with sins, and always ventures upon several more than he needs; just as, e. g., in the Maienthal alley, out of mere wantonness, he enticed Victor and Clotilda into his neighborhood with the voice of the nightingale, although Flamin might have overheard both without that Philomelic machinery. In this view, I could absolutely almost wish that the Post-Dog would not come again; I have too much reason to fear that Matthieu may bring new frog-spawn and new mother-of-vinegar to January's warmth, that it may hatch out new, sharp, poisonous misery; for he will certainly report in the highest quarters, that the three Englishmen are hiding themselves in the island as in a catacomb,—that Flamin is associated with them,—that Victor has hitherto deceived a Prince, whose subject he is,—to say nothing of still other things, which the ministerial spy and Chamberlainess von Le Baut communicates, and his father, who is so much of an anti-clubbist, paints black,—which the former draws and the latter colors. And when I consider that in this biography a little misfortune has always been the egg-shell and the white-of-the-egg of a great one,—I am very much inclined to believe that the expression of the Parson on the 21st of October contained more wit than truth: "That they were all at present, instead of the bread of tears, cutting into the bride's cake of joy." ... Ye good people! in which may now, at this moment, your bosoms be rising and falling,—in the soft, thin ether of gladness, or in the stormy vapor of agony?
While the first edition has been getting out of print, I have learned some very interesting additional circumstances for the second. Julius hugged his Victor in the garden right heartily, and said: "I am very glad to be here again,—I have been so alone all day, and not heard a human being,—thy Italian domestic has absolutely run away." In Victor's bosom, this unaccountable absconding of a faithful and contented servant raised, if not a storm-cloud, yet a dark mist. The quiet Marie had diligently discharged toward the blind one the duties of the fugitive. "I would gladly have given the Italian his letter first," Julius continued, "but here I have it still." Victor looked at it, and found, to his amazement, the address in the handwriting of—his Lordship. The letter was handed to the blind one a few minutes after the man's flight, with the request that he would give it to no one but the Italian. Although Flamin and her Ladyship promised to be answerable for the breaking of the seal, still Victor addressed himself reluctantly to this solution of a new charade of his life; for Clotilda was silent in the matter. Here is an authentic copy:—
"You are right. Do not, however, start till to-morrow, but go immediately to Mr. * * *. The place remains 5. But VI are necessary."
Mr. might mean Monsieur (the fifth son). Further than that there was nothing to be guessed from this flight of clouds of the coming weather by the best weather-prophets. The reader, however, may imagine, merely from his own eager desire to know the significance of these celestial signs, how great must have been that of our hero.
hornstart
Knef.—The Town of Hof.—Sorrel Horse.—Robbers. —Sleep.—Oath.—Night Journey.—Bushes.—End.
I say only this much beforehand: in all the time that ink—like currant-wine—has been drawn from quill-tubes,—in all the time that quills have been cut to make instruments of peace, or carbonized to make instruments of war (for the coal used in manufacturing gunpowder is prepared from feathers[196]),—and still further back, in all that time the singular occurrence has never till now happened which I am now to report to the world. As I said, this is all I say beforehand; the incident is a tolerable one.
Inasmuch as the Post-Dog has, since the forty-fourth chapter, withdrawn his hand, or paw, from this learned work, my plan was to make it out alone, and only append one more and last chapter,—but not this one,—as capstone and swan-song, so that the opus might be given at once to the post, the press, and the world. Good reviewers (thought I) I can let wrangle with the Post-Dog and biographical bell-wether as long as they please over the want of a final cadence.... It was already getting toward the end of October, and of my Robinsonade on the island of St. John's, when the good old Friday of this Robinson, my Dr. Fenk, returned from his long botanical Alpine tour home to Scheerau, but immediately put out to sea again, and landed on my St. John's domain.
We sat down to two or three courses with minced-meat (or ragout) of travelling-anecdotes. At last, I drew his attention—as all literati do—to what I had written, to my latest opusculum, what stood before us in a cursed pile as high as a conical orrery: "It has dropped from me," said I, "in an entirely cursory manner, often in the night, just as Voltaire or the pea-hens let fall their eggs on the straw in their sleep. I have taken pleasure in endowing the world with this legacy of four volumes; but the legacy still waits for its last chapter,—without which the labor of the dog (in the noble sense) will be in the bad sense a dog's-work." He read the whole bequest through before my eyes,—which gives an author a foolish, oppressive sensation,—and flung his two arms up and down often during the perusal, and would fain make the author red with extravagant praise. But it did not take; for an author has already bestowed every compliment upon himself beforehand a thousand times, and is at the same time his own flesh-scales, his own flesh-weight, and his own flesh, because, like a virtuous man, he is satisfied with his own approbation.
"The hero of thy Post-Days," said he, "is modelled somewhat after thyself."—"That," I replied, "is for the world and the hero to decide, when they both become acquainted with me; but all authors do so,—their personality is either pictured opposite the title-page, or farther on in the midst of the work, as the painter Rubens and the designer Ramberg in almost all their works bring on a dog."
But now let one imagine with what astonishment I clapped my hands when the Doctor named to me the little country where the whole story transpired: * * * is the little country's real name. "I had only to go thither," he said, "and I could draw the forty-fifth (tail-) chapter from the fountain-head. As he passed through Flachsenfingen, they had only just got to the Fortieth Dog-Post-Day. If I would take my own horses," ("That I will," said I, "I will buy me some this very day,") "I might, perhaps, come up with a distinguished passenger, who, unless all signs deceived him, was his Lordship incarnate." For the sake of a few ounces of asafœtida which Fenk needed on the road, he had even been with Zeusel in his apothecary's shop, upon whom, he said, the number ninety-nine was as legibly imprinted as the number ninety-eight was on the butterfly[197] (the Catalanta).
No one certainly can blame an author who was crabbing and fishing for his forty-fifth, tail- or train-chapter, for running away as if distracted,—packing up,—tackling up,—jumping in,—starting off, and driving so furiously, as he shot by hotels, country-houses, processions, stars, and nights, that not in * * days, but in * * * days (many a one will actually think I am drawing a long bow[198]), I sprang, bedusted but unpowdered, into the inn of the Golden Lion. The said inn is situated in the town of Hof, which again on its part is situated in something greater; namely, in Voigtland. I am careful not to name either the days of my journey or the gate through which I shot into Hof, in order that I may not reveal to curious knaves and mouchards[199] by my route of march the real name of Flachsenfingen. Hof I could name right out without harm, because from there—the moment one is past the gates—one can travel to all points of the compass; and so, too (which is a very good thing), one can arrive there from all places,—from Mönchberg, Kotzan, Gattendorf, Sachsen, Bamberg, Böheim, and from America, and from the Rascally Islands, and from any part of Büsching and Fabri.[200]
Not far from the Golden Lion (properly in Oat Lane) stood a distinguished Englishman, looking on while his four smoking horses took a medicine of two thirds common saltpetre and one third horse-brimstone against foundering. The stranger—who might have been about as many years old as this book is days was dressed in black; tall, respectable, rich (to judge by his equipage), and of a manly build. His bright and fixed eye lay kindling like a focus on men,—his face was fine and cold,—on his forehead stood the perpendicular secant as the time-bar denoting business, as sign of exclamation at the toil and trouble of life,—faint, horizontal lines were ruled across this time-bar like staves; both sorts of lines were cut into the too high forehead, as if for signs how high the tear-water of affliction had already risen on this brow, on this soul. "I would," thought I, "have painted Lord Horion differently, if this face had appeared to me sooner." Perhaps the reader thinks this was his Lordship himself.
When the Englishman had seen my tiercet of sorrels, he came straight up to me and introduced a project of exchange, and wanted to take my sorrel for a black. He had the fancy of Russians in the higher ranks, of travelling with a regular cento[201] of differently-colored horses,—as he also had the finer custom of the Neapolitans, to let a free, loose horse prance along beside the carriage. Accordingly, for the sake of the equine quodlibet, he wanted to bid in my miserable sorrel, who, to tell the truth, wore nowhere any hair of his own, except behind on the bob. I told him frankly,—to leave him no suspicion of selfishness or design,—"My three sorrels looked like the three Furies, and represented tolerably well the three cavities of anatomy; only the dark sorrel which he wanted was magnificently built, particularly about the head, and I should be sorry to lose him now, when the head was just going to be of use to me."—"So?" said the Briton.—"Of course," said I; "for a horse's head is the best remedy against bed-bugs, and this one must now very soon fall off from the nag, like a ripe plum,—the head I can then put into my bed-straw." The Englishman did not even smile; during the whole bargain he stirred not a finger, not a feature, not a muscle. Not until I myself had said, "If the three Fates only keep on their legs till I have fetched away the forty-fifth chapter on wheels," did it strike me that he had been in a distant manner studying and sounding me more than the sorrel,—and I fell upon the hypothesis, whether he had not misused the whole horse-exchange as a mere cloak and blinder of his suspicious, pumping questions.
Let the reader only just read on—The Englishman started off with my sorrel muscle-preparation; and I followed some time after with my black, who was as strong, black, and glossy as the old Adam in man.
But I must first tell what I was going to do in Hof,—I was going to dedicate. At first each of these volumes was to be inscribed to a female friend; but I had reason to fear I should rue it, because my wont is to quarrel with a different one—never with all at once—every month. I should like to know in what parallel of latitude the man were to be found who does not fall out with his lady friend a thousand times oftener than with his male one. The biographer must, therefore, of necessity, because he is too changeable, cross the street from the Golden Lion with his four volumes, and enter the house of the only man towards whom he never alters, and who never does himself either, and say to him, "Here, my dear good Christian Otto, I dedicate something to thee again,—four volumes at once.—It were handsome, if thou again wouldst dedicate each to one of thy family,—three are just enough, and thou hast thine own left for thee, too.—I am riding now after the forty-fifth chapter, and thou—cut and clear away meanwhile at the forty-four other beds as much as thou wilt."
And here, my faithful one, must thou absolutely have the last chapter also; and I only add further, "This Hesperus, which stands as morning-star over my life's fresh morning, thou mayest still look upon when my earthly day is over; then is it a quiet evening-star for quiet men, till it also sets behind its hill."
Inasmuch as all letters to me are notoriously delivered in the busy and somewhat surly city of Hof, and as in fact many travellers pass this way, one will readily indulge me with the small space for two observations, which the town itself makes upon the town. The Hofites, namely, all remark and complain that they cannot exactly become accustomed to each other. "We ought all to be able," they say, "to bear with each other very well, and, if only thereby, refute the observation of the great Montesquieu, that trade knits together nations and sunders individuals." Secondly, they all reproach each other, that from year to year they barter for in quantity, and accumulate and store away in green-houses, great cornucopias full of balsam, rose, clover, and lily-seed, and tall boxes full of splendid apple-seeds (particularly of princes' apples, violet apples, Adam's- and virgin-apples, and Dutch ketterlings),—but that they sow or set out of this seed little or nothing. "In old age," they say, "good fruits and flowers will come apropos to us, if we save a good quantity of seed out of the present ones, and then plant it."—A certain candidate (an academical chum of mine) took occasion from these two observations to make two very good points in an afternoon sermon. In the first part, he showed his Hofites out of the Epistle that they should not torment, but heartily love, each other in this fleeting vapor of life, without reference to the numbers of their houses; and in the second pars, he made it plain that they ought in this brief, waning light of life to make from time to time one and another joke....
I had hardly travelled a few hours—days—weeks (for I do not state the truth), and had gone to sleep towards midnight in my carriage as I mounted a hill in a thick forest, when suddenly two hands, which had worked their way in behind through the back window, jammed down a bee-cap[202] over my head, fastened it hastily round my neck with a padlock, covered and blinded my eyes, and ten or twelve other hands seized, held, and bound my body. The worst thing in such a case is, that one expects to be killed and robbed of his jewel-caskets; but nothing can vex and annoy more an author who has not yet finished his book than to take away his life. No man wishes to die in the midst of a plan; and yet every one at every hour of the day bears about with him at once budding, green, half-ripe, and wholly ripe plans. I sought, therefore, to defend my life with such valor—since the forty-fifth chapter and its critics weighed upon my mind—that I—although I say it—could easily have mastered four or five prince-stealers, had there not been half a dozen. I laid down my arms, but occupied the battle-field (namely, the coach-cushion),—and observed, in fact, that they did not want so much to kill the Mining-Superintendent as to blind him. The adventure grew still more romantic,—my own fellow was not tumbled from the throne of his box,—my carriage continued on the road to Flachsenfingen,—two gentlemen seated themselves in beside me, who, to judge by their feminine hands, were persons of rank,—and, strangest of all, a dog began to bark, who, by his barking, must have labored as mass-assistant and fellow-master on this learned work.
We supped and lunched in the open air. Here a surgical order-ribbon was drawn around my naked body, because I had unfortunately, during the quarter-wheelings and manual evolutions of my defence, run my shoulder-blade upon the point of a sword. I could eat very well, inasmuch as the tin canary-cage door of my bee-cap was turned wide open. Good heavens! if the public had seen the author of the Dog-Post-Days shove in his eatables through the open leaves of the leaden gate, he would have died with shame!—During the meal, I called the dog to me by the name, Hofmann! He actually came; I felt all over him, if haply any forty-fifth chapter might be hanging on his neck,—it was bare.
After a long alternation of journeying,—eating,—saying nothing,—sleeping,—days,—nights,—I was at last set down in a sea, and there carried about (or did it come from a narcotic?) till I slept like a rat. What followed—strange as it is—I shall not make known till I have first written out the observation, that, to be sure, great joy and great sorrow enliven and gratify the nobler propensities within us; but that hope, and far more anxiety, hatch the whole worm's nest of miserable hankerings, the infusorial spawn of petty ideas, and unravel them and set them to gnawing,—so that in this way the Devil and the Angel within us contrive to maintain a worse parity of their two religions than holds even in Augsburg with two others,[203] and that each of the two religious parties in man has in pay its own night-watch, censor, innkeeper, gazetteer, just as much as the aforesaid ones in Augsburg....
—I had my eyes still closed, when a whispering, swelled and multiplied into a great murmur by a thousand tree-tops, floated round me; the rushing aerial sea swept through narrow Æolian harps, and raised waves thereon, and the waves rippled over me with melodies,—a high mountain air, flung down from a cloud shooting by overhead, fell like a cooling stream of water on my breast.—I opened my eyes, and thought I was dreaming, because I was without the iron mask.—I was leaning against the fifth column on the upper step of a Grecian temple, whose white floor was encircled by the summits of tossing poplars,—and the tops of oaks and chestnuts ran waving only as fruit-hedges and espaliers round the lofty temple, and reached only up to the heart of a man standing within.
"I must surely be acquainted with this luxuriant harvest of tree-tops," said I.—"Lo, weeping birches hang their arms yonder,—out there stems kneel before the thunder which blasted them,—do not nine crape veils and sprayey fountains, in many-colored twigs, flutter through each other?—and the tempests have planted here their conductors as five iron sceptres in the earth.—-This is most certainly a dream of the Island of Reunion, which has hitherto so often darted rays across the mist of sleep, and with heavenly and winning radiance beamed upon my soul."—
But it was no dream. I rose from the step, and was about to enter the illuminated Grecian temple, which consisted only of a Grecian roof, of five columns, and the whole earth encamped around it, when eight arms embraced me, and four voices accosted me: "Brother!—we are thy brothers." Before looking upon them, before addressing them, I fell gladly with outspread arms into the midst of three hearts which I knew not, and shed tears upon a fourth, which I knew not, and at last lifted my eyes, not inquiringly, but blissfully, from the unknown hearts to their faces; and while I looked upon them, I heard behind me my beloved Dr. Fenk say: "Thou art the brother of Flamin, and these three Englishmen are thy incarnate brothers." ... Joy darted through me convulsively like a pang.—I pressed my lips mutely to those of the four embraced and embracing ones,—but I fell then upon my elder friend, and stammered, "Dear, good Fenk! tell me all! I am distracted and enchanted with things which I still do not comprehend."
Fenk went back with me smiling to the four brothers, and said to them: "See, this is the monsieur, your fifth and lost brother of the seven islands,-and your biographer into the bargain.—Now at last he has caught his forty-fifth chapter."—Then turning to me: "Thou seest, of course," said he, "that this is the Isle of Union,—that the three twins here are the sons of the Prince, whom our Lord wanted to bring back.—For thy sake, because thou hast this long time been absent from the seven islands, he has travelled through all market towns, and around all islands of Europe. At last I wrote to him." ...
"Thou hast certainly, also," I interrupted him, "been my correspondent through the dog."—
"Just go on," said he.
"And Knef is Fenk spelt backward,—and thou gavest thyself out with Victor for an Italian, who could speak no German,—copiedst off all day his own list of rules for deportment, for his Lordship, and for me too, in fact, in order to be his and my spy."—
"It is so,—and therefore I also wrote to his Lordship," said he, "that thy French name, Jean Paul, brought thee under suspicion; and as thou, besides, didst not thyself know thy origin, and, in addition to that, thy foolish bit of life-road, which, as in an English garden, would not reach a mile in a straight direction"—
"The biographer," said I, "should, in fact, be his own."[204]—
"It is incomprehensible to me now how it was that I did not happen upon this in the first instance; for thy resemblance to Sebastian, which the fifth son of the Prince should also have, thou hast thyself long since remarked,—and thy Stettin box-picture on the shoulder-blade, which these gentlemen here all have about them, and which his Lordship himself beheld day before yesterday, during the bandaging."
"So! so!" said I, "it was for this, then, that your biographer got the falcon's hood, the wound in the back, the fine black steed, and the stranger in Hof was his Lordship?"—
In short, by all this his Lordship had fully convinced himself that I was the one whom he had so long sought; for he had previously long since received Fenk's communication through fifteen hands, inasmuch as it travelled from Hamburg, or rather from the land of the Hadeln, to Ziegenhain in Lower Hesse, then into the Principality of Schwabeck, then into the Duchy of Holzapfel, to Schweinfurt, to Scheer-Scheer, and still back again to * * and to * * *, and finally to Flachsenfingen, where he at last received it; there, in the Isle of Union, he had been concealed a long time, until the communication, the ending of October, which as it were underscored the maternal marls with red ink, and, most of all, the banishing from St. Luna of the three brothers who landed on the island, constrained him to travel off to Scheerau, or rather to Hof in Voigtland. Here, naturally, I was obliged to meet him, according to a concert with the Italian servant (i. e. with Dr. Fenk), on account of which he sent me from my island after the forty-fifth chapter, and whose repetition came to hand in the billet intercepted by the blind one, and now deciphered; and my old face, which he forthwith compared with a younger engraving of the fifth princely son, threw at once in the "Oat-lane" the most ample light upon everything.
So soon as he knew this, he left me to travel on alone, under my tin bee-cap and Moses's veil, and hurried forward to the Prince just one minute before it was too late. For Matthieu had betrayed all; and they were just on the point of sending to arrest the three twins, on the island where they had taken refuge, and our Victor at his mother's house, wherein he had already forgotten court and nobility for patients and sciences and bride, when his Lordship sent in his name to the Prince. The Prince was afraid of being persuaded by him, as Cæsar was of Cicero. His Lordship—whose soul, indeed, was a petrographic[205] chart of sublime ideas—confounded the measures of the Prince by a more daring and defiant boldness than these measures had reckoned on. He began with the intelligence, that he brought not merely one son to the Prince, but all; which last thing he had not promised, for the reason that he could not know how far fate would perhaps leave or lead him.—He forced the Prince to listen to a long and cold discourse, wherein he laid before him the plan of study for the five sons, and their development, history, and destiny; while he seemed to presuppose the proofs of their extraction, he however wove them elaborately into the inferences he drew from it. Thus, e. g., he said, no one had known about the important secret but her Ladyship and Clotilda and Emanuel, whose sacred documents, sealing all with death, he here presented him, together with others for the children; only a certain court-page had, during his blindness, stolen and abused one of five secrets. His Lordship did not pluck to pieces this snare of a soul, because, as he said, it was too insignificant for satisfaction, too black-dyed for punishment, and because he himself besides would soon depart out of these regions forever. In short, with his omnipotence he took such a hold of the Prince, and drew all veils so clean off from the past, that he almost compelled him, instead of condemning or acquitting, merely to deprecate and to exchange accusation and mistrust for gratitude. The single good thing, Lord Horion said in conclusion, which the Page had done, was, that, by his weed-sowing-machines, he had ripened and expedited the great and fair recognition precisely for a monthly period, when the festoon of the five shoulders (the maternal moles) were in full bloom. The Prince, in spite of the other party's iciness, was melted, for his paternal love was enriched with new treasures. Nevertheless, he mixed in with his thanks this delicate reproach against Victor's pretended nobility: "I am full of gratitude for you, although you deprive me too soon of the opportunity of showing it. Hitherto I have rejoiced that I could at least prove to the son how very much indebted, if not grateful, I was to the father. But you know my error." His Lordship—now made more pliant by victory—replied: "I know not whether good intentions and bad circumstances excuse me; but I could regard him only as worthy to be your body physician, whom I— acknowledged worthy to be my son."—The Prince embraced him cordially; his Lordship reciprocated it quite as warmly, and said: "On the 31st of October," (that is to-day, and he said it yesterday,) "he would seal his honest sentiments toward the Prince in a manner more decisive than words."—
Noble man! Thou consumest nothing on the earth beyond thyself, and art a storm-bird, through whose fat a wick of the lamp is threaded, and which is now burned out and carbonized by its own light,—I have a presentiment, as if thy fair soul would soon be on another, higher Isle of Reunion than this earthly one!
I write this on the' forenoon of the 31st of October, at ten o'clock, on the island.
* * * * *
Wherewith will this book end at last?—with a tear or with an exultation?—
Dr. Fenk, until two o'clock (for not till then would his Lordship arrive), threw the brown or lump-sugar of humor upon our minutes and sorrows; his whimsical red face was the violet sugar-loaf paper of sweetness. My good Victor was with Clotilda in Maienthal. Fenk kept up one continued laugh at me as a dauphin. He makes many similes, he says: "I should not, until the end of a book and of the whole play, get my true title, as they do not print the general title-page of the journals till the last number,—or," he says, "like a pawn at chess, I should not be promoted until the last row to be an officer." It is, however, very well known to me from history, that in France, even under Louis XIV., the present system of equality already existed, though first with reference to princes, whom the king made equal, whether they entered upon life as Mestizoes[206] or Creoles, or Quatroons[207] or Quintoons, or as born to the throne. As now one can produce new laws and novellæ[208] of imperial statute quite as well in Germany as beyond its limits, it might well happen in my lifetime that legitimated princes should be declared competent to the throne,—whereby I of course should come to be ruler. It were well for Flachsenfingen if that should happen, because I will buy me beforehand the best French and Latin works on government, and study the subject in them so well that I cannot fail. I think I may venture to take it upon me to set the poor human race, which is forever living in the first of April, and which never gets out of its standing-stool or go-cart,—the only change being the addition of more wheels to the cart,—on its legs again a little by my sceptre. Time was when a nobleman and the horse of an English riding-master were capable of doffing the hat, of firing a pistol, of smoking tobacco, of telling whether there was a damsel in the company, &c.; but now-a-days horse and nobleman have come to be so distinguished from each other by culture, that it is a true honor to be the latter, and that it does not harm my nobility (though I feared it in the beginning) that I have more than common learning. In our days the head-horses of the nobility are no longer harnessed on so far ahead of the citizenly wheel-horses to the chariot of state as they were a hundred years since; hence duty, or at least prudence, dictates (even for a new nobleman like me) that he (or I) should let himself down, and hide the consciousness of his rank (why should not I succeed in that as well as another?) under the grace of an easy and complaisant good-breeding, and in fact take no airs upon himself about any ancestors, except for the future ones, of whose collective merits I cannot think greatly enough, because the earth is still mighty young,[209] and just in petticoats, and, like the Poles, in Polish frock.
To return: at two o'clock, his Lordship came with his blind son, like Philosophy with Poesy. Beautiful, beautiful youth! innocence has sketched thy cheeks, love thy lips, enthusiasm thy forehead. His Lordship, with his Laudon's[210] forehead, and with a face more obscured and shaded to-day than in Hof, on which the honeymoon of youth and the passion-weeks of later age threw a confused chiaroscuro,—he came to us to-day almost warmer than usual, although with features expressive of nothing but the feeling that life is an intercalary day, and that he loves only philanthropy, not men. He said, we must do him and the Hof-medicus the pleasure of visiting the latter this very day in Maienthal, and bringing him hither, because he had still to complete here without eyewitnesses all sorts of arrangements for the arrival of the Prince; we must, however, come back again with Victor in the night, because our distinguished father would arrive very early in the morning. The blind one, as blind, could stay where he was. It did not occur to me, that he concealed from the good, darkened Julius, that he was his father, for he said, with double and treble meaning: "As the good creature has once already had to endure the pain of losing a father, we must not a second time expose him to this sorrow." But this did strike me, that he begged us to requite him for what he had hitherto sought to do in behalf of Flachsenfingen, by doing this ourselves, and assuring him with an oath, that in the public offices which we should get, we would fulfil his cosmopolitan wishes, which he delivered to us in writing, at least until such time as he should see us again. The Prince had been obliged to give him the same solemn assurance. We looked up at him as at a beclouded comet, and took the oath with sorrow.
We entered on the road to Maienthal. An Englishman related to us that he had seen behind the mourning-thicket—the sleeping chamber of the blind one's mother, his Lordship's beloved, who rests beneath a black marble slab—a second marble set up, which the crape-veils sweeping over it were meant to cover, but could not. O then did each of us look round him with a heavy heart toward the island, as towards an undermined city, ere it is blown to pieces and hurled into the air.—But my longing to behold Victor and Maienthal, that labyrinthine flower-garden of my warmest dreams, drowned the anxious apprehension.
At last we climbed the southern mountain, and the variegated Eden, with its fulness of foliage and with the multitude of its pulsating twigs, grew with a murmur down into the valley.—Up yonder among the boughs lay, like a nightingale's nest, Emanuel's peaceful cottage, in which was now my Victor,—nearer to us rustled the chestnut avenue, and without, overhead, reposed the mowed churchyard.—To me, who had seen all this hitherto only in the dream of fancy, it seemed now again as if dreams were coming on; and the opaque ground became a transparent one, full of shapes created out of vapor,—and I sank full of sadness on the hill.... I went down at last as into a promised land, but my whole soul was swathed in a soft funeral veil.
—And my Victor tore away the veil, and pressed his warm soul to mine, and we melted together into one glowing point.—But I will, by and by, when he comes back from the abbey, once more and still more warmly fall on his breast, and then at length truly tell him my love.... O Victor, how gentle thou art, and how harmonious, how ennobled, how beautiful in the tear of joy, how great in thy inspiration!—Ah, love of man, thou that givest to the inner man the Grecian profile, and to his motions lines of beauty, and to his charms bridal ornaments, redouble thy wondrous and healing powers in my hectic breast, when I see fools, or sinners, or uncongenial men, or enemies, or strangers!
Victor, who never made the anxiety of a man still greater, gave us some satisfaction about his Lordship. He went to the convent to Clotilda, to announce our visit to her and the Abbess,—the lateness of the visit he excuses by the necessity of a nightly return. Till he comes back, I suspend my story. My eyes followed him on his way to the betrothed; and his hand, his eye, and his mouth were full of greetings for every one, especially for despised people, for old men, for old widows. The joy of my hero becomes mine. Time is working at the beautiful day, when his heart shall forever melt into one with the betrothed, when, without a remaining link of the sundered flea- and ape-chain of the court, he shall walk freely through nature, be nothing but a man, make nothing but curves, instead of cour, love nothing but the whole world, and be too happy to be envied. Then will I, for once, my Bastian, eat with thee at evening in the moonlight, under the steam and the hum of the linden, and seat myself on the bales of freshly unpacked and printed Dog-Post-Days. For the rest,—although I did let my own inner man sit to paint his by,—I am but a wretched, dissolved, wiped-out slate-copy of him, only a very freely paraphrased interpretation of this soul; and I find that a cultivated parson's son is, at bottom, better than an uncultivated prince, and that princes are not, like poets, born, but made.
I hope I have material enough to keep me writing till he comes back. I have, in fact, in this biography, as supernumerary copyist of Nature, all along borrowed from reality,—e. g. for Flamin's character I had in my head a captain of dragoons,—in the case of Emanuel, I thought of a great man dead, a celebrated writer, who, the very day when I with sweet, shuddering entrancement wrote Emanuel's dream of annihilation, went from the earth and half under it,—the goddess Clotilda I compounded of two female angels, and I shall see for myself, in a few minutes, whether I hit them. It is provoking, that in conversations, from the force of habit, I give to the people of this book the names they bear in the Dog-Post-Days; whereas Flamin is properly called * *, and Victor * *, and Clotilda actually * *. It were to be wished—I have not sworn not to do it—that I could, after the death of some moral blasés and plague-infected personages of these volumes, or after my own, make known to the world the true names. If I do it, then will learned Europe be initiated into all the reasons, which the political world already knows, that have kept the Mining-Superintendent from letting fall upon some parts of his history (especially upon the court) so much light as he might actually have given; and I am curious to see whether, after the exposé of these reasons, the newspaper correspondent A. and the secretary of legation Z.—the two greatest enemies of the Flachlsenfingen court, and of me personally—will still assert that I am stupid. Nay, I am bold enough to appeal publicly here to the * * agent in * * to say whether I have not wholly left out many persons in the history, who had acted a part in it, and who had entered into the actual machinery of my biographical sugar-mill as undershot wheels; nay, more, I even give my pair of adversaries permission to name to the world the personages I have left out,—who have some power to do injury,—if this two-head vulture has the heart to do it....
The good Spitzius Hofmann is now wagging his tail, and leaping up before me. Good, industrious Post-Dog! Jean Paul's biographical Egeria! I will, as an encouraging example, so soon as I have time, flay thee and stuff thee neatly, and fill thee as with a sausage-filling of hay, in order to set thee up in a public library as thine own bust beside other distinguished scholars!—Meusel is a reasonable man, to whom I will apply, in a private and autographic communication, for a seat in his Learned Germany for Spitz. This scholar will not be able, any better than I, to see why such a diligent hod-carrier and compiler and forwarder of learning as my dog is should suffer a more pitiful and colder fate than other learned hod-carriers, merely because he bears a tail, which represents his posterior-toupee. That is all which gives the poor beast an inferior place in the scale of literati.
—I now see Victor escorted with lights through the bowers of the garden. I will only throw out, as hastily as possible, the further statement, that I am sitting in the sacristy of Emanuel, which is latticed with leafless shrubbery. Hurry not so, Sebastian, thou that, in respect to thy previous transformations, resemblest the three or four pseudo-Sebastians in Portugal; hurry not, that I may still simply say to my sister, "Thou beloved ex-sister, thy crazy brother writes himself von, but thou hast lost only his breast, not his heart. When I come to Scheerau, I will care for nothing, but weep on thee during the embrace, and finally say, It is no matter. My spirit is thy brother, thy soul is my sister; and so, change not, sisterly heart."
—The good Victor walks hastily, Ah, men whom sorrow has often chilled have neither in their bodily nor moral motions the slow symmetry of prosperous fortune, just as people who wade in the water take great broad strides.—Poor Victor! why dost thou now weep so, that thou absolutely canst not dry thy tears?...
* * * * *
Ah, it is long ago that I asked, "Will this book close with a tear?"—Victor came back at eight o'clock last night with two great immovable tears on the brink of his eyelid, and said: "We will just hasten back somewhat rapidly to the island. Clotilda herself begs us to do so, and to take another time for seeing her."—"A misfortune," I have dreamed, "is just now rearing itself large and high like a sea-serpent, and flinging itself upon human hearts, as that does upon ships, and crushing them under." She had grown every minute more anxious and oppressed, as one becomes in a damp spot over which the lightning darts and hisses. What else did this imply, than that his Lordship had disclosed to his faithful friend things which we feared this night to experience? And we could none of us any longer conceal from ourselves the fear that his weary spirit meant perhaps, like Lycurgus, to stamp the seal of his corpse upon his assurance that we were January's sons, and, moreover, on our oath to be good, and on that of the Prince to obey my brothers, till he should return.
"Weep not so sorely, Victor," said I; "it is not, after all, yet certain." He quietly dried his eyes, and merely said: "We will, then, now go to the island,—it is already nine o'clock."
We went along, far, far aside from the spotted weeping-birch, which threw its torn-off leaves toward the wasted remains of the great man. Victor could not look that way for sorrow; but I looked with a chill trembling where it swayed in the serene night-heavens. Not until after some days, when Victor had become happier; had the dust of Emanuel contracted itself again, as it were, into a pale form, and erected itself out on the burial-green, and opened wide its arms for its old darling,—and Victor moaned and pined, and sought vainly to press the white shadow to his dying breast.
He smiled sadly, as he sought to divert us and himself by the words, "Foolish man ducks like a bird, if calamity only approaches him from afar off." His tears made him a blind man, and Flamin and I were his guides; nevertheless he greeted in his pain a night-express.
I have said nothing (for I cannot) of the garden of termination, of the withered scene of faded, leafless days of joy.
Over the stubble and over the chrysalides of night-butterflies (the jugglers of future spring-nights), and over the steadfast, subterranean winter sleep, swept the solitary night-winds.—Ah, man might well think, "Breezes, come ye not hither over graves, over precious, precious graves?—"
I said, "How slender is the pale-green interval of earth between human bodies and human skeletons!"—Victor said, "Ah, Nature has so much repose, and why has our heart so little?"
It was near midnight. The heavens glittered nearer to the earth; the Swan, the Lyre, Hercules,[211] beamed from where they had gone down through another blue of heaven. Great heaven,—said every heart,—dost thou belong to the human spirit, dost thou one day receive it, or art thou only like the ceiling-picture of a minster, which hides the limiting walls, and opens out with colors the prospect of a heaven which does not exist?—Ah, every Present makes our soul so small, and only a Future makes it so great.
Victor was beside himself, and said again: "Repose! neither joy nor sorrow can give thee, but only hope. Why is not all at rest within us, as around us?"
At that moment the knell of a shot, repeated by all the echoing woods, rang through the silent night,—and the Isle of Union swam up in the night-blue, and its white temple hung over it,—and beside the mourning-thicket, which grew up over the mouldering remains of a youthful heart, nine slender flames, which ran up on the nine crape-veils, shot up toward heaven, as if they were feux de joie to a festival of peace.
Pale, hurrying, sighing, and silent, we touched the first shore of the island. The water was sucked up dry by the ground. The black Eastern gate had flung itself wide open, and leaned and hid its white painted sun against the trees. Many funeral torches, on white lustres, attached themselves to the Eastern gate, went in through the long green avenue, flickered over ruins, sphinxes, and marble torsos, and ended darkly in the mourning-thicket.
Fluttering music of Æolian harps was permeated at the entrance by long tones. Under the Eastern gateway the blind one rested quietly and played joyously on his flute,—just as a dove flies into the thunder.
He fell joyfully on the neck of his Victor, and said: "It is good that thou comest; a tall, still man has lain a quarter of an hour on my heart, and wept into my hand, and given me a leaf for thee."
Victor snatched the leaf; it read: "You have all sworn to fulfil my requests until such time as you hear my voice again; but uncover not the black marble."—His Lordship had given it to the blind son. Victor cried: "O father! O father! I could not then make thee any requital!" and sank upon the breast of the son. He was about to tear himself away again, but the blind youth hung around him, and smiled with glad unconsciousness into the night.—We hastened into the mourning-thicket,—and, by the dim light of the two funeral torches that were burning down therein, we saw that a second grave had been scooped out there, the fresh earth of which lay near by,—that a black marble covered the hollow, and that the black dress of his Lordship peeped out a little way from the opening, and that in there he had killed himself.—And on his black marble stood, as upon the marble of his beloved, an ashy-pale heart, and below the heart stood in white letters the words: