Postulates--apothegms--philosophems--Erasmian adages--observations of
Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Lavater, do I in one week invent in countless
numbers, more than I can in six months get rid of by bringing them into
my biographical _petits soupés_ as episode-dishes. Thus does the
lottery-mintage of my _unprinted_ manuscripts swell higher and higher
every day, the more extracts and winnings I deal out to my reader
therefrom in print. In this way I creep out of the world without having,
while in it, said anything. Lavater takes a more rational course; he
lets the whole lottery-wheel, filled with treasures, under the title of
manuscripts (just as we, inversely, despatch manuscripts to the
publishers by mail under the title of printed matter) circulate even
among the _literati_.
But why shall I not do the same, and let at least one or two lymphatic
veins of my water-treasure leap up and run out? I limit myself to ten
persecutions of the reader,--calling my ten aphorisms thus, merely
because I imagine the readers to be martyrs of their opinions, and
myself the Regent who converts them by force. The following aphorism, if
one reckons the foregoing as the first persecution, is, I hope, the
_SECOND._
Nothing sifts and winnows our preferences and partialities better than
an imitation of the same by others. For a genius there are no sharper
polishing-machines and grinding-disks at hand than his apes. If,
further, every one of us could see running along beside him a duplicate
of himself, a complete Archimimus[63] and repeater in complimenting,
taking off the hat, dancing, speaking, scolding, bragging, &c.; by
Heaven! such an exact repeating-work of our discords would make quite
other people out of me and other people than we are at present. The
first and least step which we should take toward reflection and virtue
would be this, that we should find our bodily methodology, e. g. our
walk, dress, dialect, our oaths, looks, favorite dishes, &c., no better
than those of all others, but just the same. Princes have the good
fortune that all courtiers around them station themselves as faithful
supernumerary copyists and pier-mirrors of _their_ selves, and propose
to improve them by this Helot-mimicry. But they seldom attain their good
end, because the Prince,--and that were also to be feared of me and the
reader,--like the principle of _non-distinguendum_, does not believe in
any real twins, but imagines that in morals, as in catoptrics, every
mirror and mock rainbow shows everything _inverted_.
_THIRD._
It is easier and handier for men to flatter than to praise.
_FOURTH._
In the centuries before us humanity appears to us to be growing up; in
those which come after us, to be fading away; in our own, to burst forth
in glorious bloom: thus do the clouds, only when in our zenith, seem to
move straight forward, those in front of us come up from the horizon,
the others behind us sail downward with fore-shortened forms.
_FIFTH._
What makes old age so sad is, not that our joys, but that our hopes then
cease.[64]
_SIXTH._
The old age of women is sadder and more solitary than that of men;
spare, therefore, in them their years, their sorrows, and their sex! In
fact, life often resembles the trap-tree with its spines directed
upward, on which the bear easily clambers up to the honey-bait, but from
which he can slide down again only under severe stings.
_SEVENTH._
Have compassion on Poverty, but a hundred times more on Impoverishment!
Only the former, not the latter, makes nations and individuals better.
_EIGHTH._
Love lessens woman's delicacy and increases man's.
_NINTH._
When two persons, in suddenly turning a corner, knock their heads
together, each begins anxiously to apologize, and thinks only the other
feels the pain and that he himself has all the blame. (Only I excuse
myself without any embarrassment, for the very reason that I know, by my
persecutions, how the other party thinks.) Would to God we did not
invert this in the case of moral offences!
_LAST PERSECUTION OF THE READER._
Deluded and darkened man, living on from the mourning veil to the
corpse-veil, thinks there is no further evil beyond that which he has
immediately to overcome; and forgets that after the victory the new
situation brings a new struggle. Hence, as before swift ships there
swims a hill of water and a corresponding billowy abyss glides along
close behind, so always before us is there a mountain, which we hope to
climb, and behind us still a deep valley out of which we seem to have
ascended.
Thus does the reader vainly hope now, after having stood out ten
persecutions, to ride into the haven of the story, and there to
lead a peaceable life, free from the troubled one of my
characters; but can any spiritual or worldly arm, then, protect
him against scattered similes,--against hemispherical
headaches,--whimsies,--reviews,--curtain-lectures,--rainy
months,--or in fact honey-moons, which come in at the end of
every volume?--
Now for our History! In the evening Albano and Augusti went with the
paternal letter of credit to the Minister's. The frostiness and pride of
that individual the Lector endeavored, on their way, to varnish over by
praising his laboriousness and discernment. With a knocking at his heart
the Count seized the door-knocker to the heaven- or hell-gate of his
future destiny. In the antechamber--that higher servant's apartment and
_Limbus infantum et patrum_--there were still people enough, for
Froulay regarded an antechamber as a stage, which must never be empty,
and on which, as in the Jewish temple, according to the Rabbins, for
those who kneel and pray, it is never too close. The Minister's lady was
not present as a patient here, merely because she was looking after one
of her own elsewhere. The Minister also was not here,--because he made
few ceremonies, and only demanded uncommonly many,--but in his
working-cabinet; he had heretofore had his head under the warm
throne-canopy and taken a deep bite into the forbidden apple of the
Empire, therefore he willingly made a sacrifice (not _to_ others, but
_of_ others), and let himself, as a saintly statue, be hung round with
votive limbs, without having to bestir his own, and, like St. Franciscus
at Oporto, with letters of thanks and petitions which he never opens.
Froulay came, and was--as ever, _aside_ from business--as courteous as a
Persian. For Augusti was his home friend,--i. e. the Minister's lady was
_his_ home-friend,--and Albano was not a good person to run against;
because one had occasion for his foster-father in the votes of the
Province, and because the youth by a peculiar and proper pride of his
own commanded men. There is a certain noble pride through which merits
shine brighter than through modesty. Froulay had not the most
comfortable part before him; for the Court of Haarhaar was as
disaffected toward the Knight of the Fleece, as he was toward it;[65]
but Haarhaar was to be without doubt (according to all Italian
_surgical_ reports) and in a few years (according to all _nosological_
ones) the heir of his inheritance and throne. Now the bad thing about it
was, that the Minister, who, like a good Christian, looked mainly to the
future, had to creep along between the German Herr von Bouverot, on the
one hand, who was secretly a creature of Haarhaar, and the demands of
the present moment, on the other.
He received the Count, I said, in an uncommonly obliging manner, as well
as the Lector, and disclosed to the two that he must present to them his
lady, who desired their acquaintance. He sent word to her, but, without
waiting an answer, conducted them both into her apartment. Now was it to
the youth as if the heavy door of a still and holy temple turned on its
hinges. Even I too, at this moment, during their passage through the
rooms, share so in his foolishness that I fall into full as great
anxiety, as if I went in behind them. When we entered the eastern room,
which was extended out at pleasure by picturesque paper-tapestry into a
latticed arbor of woodbine, there sat merely the Minister's lady, who
received us pleasantly, with firm and cold reserve in look and tone. Her
severely closed and faintly-marked lips mutely spoke a seriousness which
is the gift of a good heart, and a stillness which is the ornament of
beauty,--as many wings, only when they are folded, shower down
peacocks'-eyes,--and her eye gleamed with the good-will of reason; but
the eyelids had been, by stern years, drawn deeply in, with a sickly
expression, over the mild sight. Ah, as oftentimes between newly-married
people a dividing sword was laid, so did Froulay grind daily at a
three-edged one which separated him and her! Singularly did the impure
roil on his face contrast with the aftersummer serenity on hers,
although before witnesses, as it seemed, he took away the irony from his
courteousness towards her, and kept hatred, as others do love, only for
solitude.
Fortunately this nut-tree, which threw an unwholesome, frosty nut-shadow
on the whole flowerage of love and poetry, soon transplanted itself back
again among more congenial guests. The Minister's lady, after the first
expressions of courtesy, directed herself more to the Lector, whose
correct, civilian's measure accorded entirely with her religious one;
especially as only he could ask and condole with her about Liana. She
replied, that this room of Liana's had been left exactly as it was the
evening the blindness came on, in order that, when she recovered, it
might remain for her a pleasant remembrancer, or a mournful one for
others, if she did not. O, deeply moved Albano, if every absence
glorifies, how much more must it do so with so many traces of the
beloved object's presence! I confess, except a loved one, I know of
nothing lovelier than her sitting-room in her absence.
On Liana's work-table lay a sketched outline of a Christ's head near the
open Messiah,--a folded walking-veil, together with the green
walking-fan, with inscribed wishes of female friends,--some cut-out
envelopes,--the gossiping letter of one of Froulay's tenants,--a whole
lacquerwork sheep-fold, with wagon, stalls, and house, with whose
Lilliputian Arcadia she had proposed to please Dian's children,[66]--a
plucked leaf from the thinning album of a female friend, which she had
trimmed with an India-ink flower border and then planted full of fair
wishes, of which fate had robbed her own life. Ah, beautiful heart, how
fondly would I sketch and hand round something like a tabular view of
all the little mosaic of thy lightsome past, had the fee-provost entered
more intimately into these matters! But what moves me and the Count more
deeply is a framed embroidery, on which her needle, like an
ingrafting-knife, had, on that dark day, ingrafted a rose with two buds,
and which wanted nothing more but the thorns. O, _these_ had destiny
only too fully developed on thy roses of joy, and then pressed them so
deeply through thy breast even to the heart!
At no hour of his life was Albano's love so tender and holy as at this,
or his sympathy so fervent. Fortunately, the Minister's lady was all the
time looking out of the window into the garden, and did not perceive his
emotion. At last she went on to point out Liana's harmonica, which stood
near; then was his heart too full and visible; he started with the hasty
words, _he had never yet heard one_, and stepped before it. Ah, he was
fain to touch something whereon her finger had so often rested. He laid
his hand, as upon a sacred thing, on those prayer-bells which had so
often trembled under hers for pious thoughts; but they gave him no
answer, till the Lector, a connoisseur in the A B C as in the technology
of all arts, gave him in three words the indispensable instructions. Now
did he drink into his soul, full of sighs and struggles, the first
tri-clang, the first plaintive syllables of that mother-tongue of the
pining breast,--ah, of those _mutes'-bells_ which the inner man shakes
in his hand, because he has no tongue! and his veins beat wildly like
wings which wafted him up from the ground, and bore him to a higher
prospect than that which opens into the last joy or the last agony. For
in strong men great pains and joys become overlooking heights of the
whole road of life.
I know not whether many readers will believe the fault _possible_, which
he now _actually_ committed. The Minister's wife, in the course
of conversation, had very naturally--_apropos_ of Liana and
Roquairol--fallen upon the proposition that no school is more necessary
to children than that of patience, because, either the will must be
broken in childhood or the heart in old age. Ah, she and her daughter
themselves knelt, indeed, full of patience, before fate, whether loading
or armed; although the mother's was a pious patience, which looked more
to Heaven than to the wound, Liana's a loving patience, which resigns
itself to new sorrows as to old sicknesses, as a queen does on
coronation-day to the pains and friction of her heavy jewelry, and like
a child that sweetly sleeps away and more sweetly dreams away his scars.
But Zesara, who like a wolf fled the very clanking of a chain, and new,
exasperated, against everything of the kind, from the light carcanets
and chains of knighthood even to the heavy harbor-chains which obstruct
the passage of youth out into the laboring sea, could not restrain
himself, especially with that heart of his so full of emotions, from
saying, in too great warmth: "Man must defend himself; sooner would I,
in a free struggle, empty all my veins on the stirring battle-field than
shed one drop from them bound to the rack."--"Patience," said the
Minister's lady, who was full of it, "contends and conquers also, only
in the heart."--"Dear Count," said Augusti, alluding not merely to
Arria,[67] "the women must always say to the men, 'It does not hurt!'"
I have not till now had an opportunity to make known this fault of
Albano, that he never spoke his opinion more freely and strongly than
just then when he had reason to fear losing one or two heavens of his
life by the stake; in cases of less danger he could be more yielding.
Although, therefore, he observed that the Minister's lady was painfully
reminded thereby of the muscular, but also hard-grasping, hand of her
wild son,--or much rather _for the very reason_ that he observed it, and
because he proposed to be armor-bearer to this future friend,--he stuck
to his opinion, threw all instruments for breaking in the young manly
will out of the school-rooms into the street, and said, in his strongly
relieved style: "The Goths preferred never to send their children to
school, in order that they might remain lions. Even if maidens must be
soaked in milk a day before planting them out in the civil world, boys,
however, must be stuck, like apricots, with the stony shell in the
earth, because they will soon enough throw off and forsake the stone by
their rooting and growth."--The Lector, with his fine openness,--a
crystal vase with golden edge,--remarked, with a gentle reprimand of
Alban's impetuosity, that at least the way in which they had severally
adduced their proofs was one of those very proofs themselves; and women
needed and showed more patience with persons, and we more with things.
The Minister's wife, who imagined herself listening more to her son than
to his friend, was silent, and stepped nearer to the window. Amid these
war-troubles the evening had wheeled her resplendent moon up over the
eastern mountains, and the streams of her light flowed in at this
moment, from all quarters, through the whole garden that lay stretched
out before the eastern room, and lay in its broad alleys and
flower-circles, when all at once a little round house appeared through
upshooting water-jets, kindled into triumphal arches by the moon-light,
and stood, even to its Italian trellised roof, all in a blaze. With soft
emotion, the Minister's lady said: "On that water-house stands my Liana;
she is trying the evaporation of the fountain; the physician promises
himself much therefrom. And Providence grant it!"
But the agitated Zesara, with all his sharp eyes, could not, however, in
the full dazzling light of the level moon, and behind the quivering
nunnery-grate of confined silver-or lymphatic-veins, individualize
anything at this moment from the glimmering Eden, except an
undistinguishable, still, white form. But it was enough for a weeping
and burning heart. "Thou angel of my youthful dreams," thought he, "may
it be thou! I greet thee with a thousand woes and joys. Ah! can there
then be sorrows in thee, thou heavenly soul!" And it came over him, that
if she were here in the room, with her afflicted and enchanting form,
she would melt his whole being with sympathy, and he could now have cast
off the embrace of the brother, by whose hand fate had closed her soft
eyes in that long dream.
The stifling air of the most painful sympathy caused him to look away,
and turn round, and fasten on the open Messiah those eyes whose drops he
would not show; but the recollection that he was repeating her last
reading-pleasure made them fall only hotter and thicker. Suddenly
something darkening, which fluttered down before the window like a
falling raven, directed his look again to Liana, over whom stood a fully
illuminated little cloud, as if it were a risen or descending saintly
halo. Immortals seemed to dwell thereupon as on Ossian's clouds,
awaiting their sister; and when she at length moved and slowly sank down
into the water-house, seemed it not then as if her garment of flesh
were passing into the earth, and her peaceful spirit into the cloud?
Here Augusti, as the mother had to follow the returning invalid into the
sick-chamber, gave him the hint for departure, which he took willingly;
his love contented itself for the present with solitude, and with the
hope of another meeting. Young love and young birds need, in the
beginning, only to be _warmed_ by _covering_, and not till later to be
_nourished_.
But a paraclete or comforter whispered softly in the ear of the youth's
heart as they departed: to-morrow thou wilt see her only a few steps
from thee in the garden! And that is very easily brought about; he has
only, at evening-twilight to-morrow, when the evening-walker makes use
of her eye-medicine, to repair to the alley, and from among the leaves
look freely up into the magic countenance, and then drink in the whole
doctrine of felicity in one paragraph, one passage, breath, moment;--but
what a prospect!
The Count begged the Lector not to sit long with the busy Minister. When
they found him again, he hardly--behind a pile of public
documents--remembered, after considerable (perhaps counterfeited)
thought, that they had been there, and deeply regretted that they were
going away. Ah, the comforter is whispering all the evening and all
night,--To-morrow, Albano!