Concert.--The Hero Gets a Fashionable Tutor.
I have betaken myself to a new section because I have therein to
present to the reader a new person--the Tutor of my hero.
I need not remind a soul, that the Captain looked for so foolish a
thing--a thing now too pliable, now too bashful--such a moralizing,
spiritless thing as a tutor, in Scheerau, in order that his child might
get a regent at the same time with the country. Now, he had there a
godfather, who practiced law, music, small talk and the lorgnette and
the world's manners; but he had not the courage to propose to that
party the office of instruction in a seminary of which the number of
pupils amounted to one male. I will just say it out at once, that I
myself am this godfather and this new personage; but it will stand my
modesty in better stead, if, in a section where I must needs bring
forward so much in my own praise, I transpose myself out of the first
person into the third, and say merely godfather, not I.
This godfather blew in the Unter-Scheerau Concert, in order, with his
flute, to accompany the heavenly voice of a very young Frauelein von
Roeper, whose throat could often hardly be distinguished from the flute.
The whole soul of this damsel is a nightingale's tone under an
overhanging curtain of blossoms; her body is a falling, heavenly-pure
snowflake, which lasts only in the ether and melts away on the filthy
ground. The flutist's eyes and heart were arrested, during the pauses,
by a beautiful child, who was lost in a dreamy, phantasying gaze of
rapturous attention: it was Gustavus. His first look, after the
accompaniment, was toward the neighborhood of the child, in order to
find his owner--the first step the godfather took was to the other
godparent, the Captain, whose friendly relations with me are well
enough known. The male sex is more fortunate and less envious than the
female, because the former is able to appreciate with the whole soul
two kinds of beauty, male and female; whereas women, for the most part,
love only that of the other sex. I, however, have, perhaps, too much
enthusiasm for that exalted thing, manly beauty, as well as for poetic
enthusiasm, notwithstanding that, of the latter at least, I myself have
nothing. From Gustavus the double enchantment acted upon me; I forgot
all the enchantresses of the concert in the enchanter; but in the end I
was sad, because I could win fewer words than glances from the lovely
boy. To the concert, moreover, I, like the rest of the hearers, paid
attention only so long as I myself was a fellow-laborer, or as long as
one of my female pupils played; for the Scheerau concerts are merely
town-talk and prosaic melodramas set to music, wherein the gossip of
the hearers in their seats runs along as printed text under the
composition. For the rest we subscribe to our concerts more for our
children's sake than our own; the musical school-youth get there a
dancing floor and riding-school for their fingers and one at least of
my catechumens weekly thrums and thrashes the harpsichord. I encourage
the parents to this, and say that in such a concert-hall the little
ones learn time, because of that there is not only enough there, but
more than enough, inasmuch as every musical functionary there pipes,
beats, strikes, stamps his own original time, which, in the first
place, no one of his neighbors pipes, beats, strikes or stamps after
him, and which he himself, secondly, improves from minute to minute.
And even if this were not so, I tell them, still there is true musical
expression there, and enough to spare; every one expresses there his
own emotions, whether of embarrassment or of complete confusion, on his
particular instrument; and Bach's rule, to render dissonances forcibly
and consonances faintly, every one understands in a hall where the
consonances melt in so softly that one can hardly catch a single one of
them, and fancies he hears only the discords.
The next morning I flew, half-dressed, to the Captain and--as I could
not secure the dear little fellow at any lower price--I brought him
right up to the first object of his journey, namely, to take a tutor
home with him. It must not be thought that I got myself made an
instructor in order to be a biographer, _i. e_., in order craftily to
educate _into_ my Gustavus all that I afterward wanted to write
out of him into a book; for, in the first place, I, surely, as a
romance-manufacturer, needed merely to imagine myself such, and impose
the fiction upon others; but, secondly, at that time a biography had
not been thought of.
It is of far less concern to me to see that my Scheerau relations are
understood, than to the world, for I know them already, but the world
does not. I formed there a Trinity of three persons. I was music
master, legal adviser, and man of the world. Three whimsical parts! I
studied in a city which once furnished the greatest _jurists_ and now
furnishes the smallest _dogs_, two quite opposite articles, as Paris
was once the University of all European _theologues_ and is now of
_philosophers_. I have been in Paris also. There, too, I might have
become a clever Parliamentary advocate but I would not, and brought
nothing away from there with me (as well as from Bologna and some
German Imperial cities) but the black legal cloak, which has its
reason; for as our clients feed and fee us, and retain more justice and
poverty than money, accordingly we patrons mourn for them in black.
With the Romans, on the contrary, the clients, who got more than they
gave, put on for the advocate, when he came off poorly, a mourning
suit.
Secondly, I was music master, but perhaps not a very steady one; for I
fell in love with all my female pupils the first quarter (male pupils I
declined), and let my feelings shape themselves after my lessons. I
cherished a true tenderness, first, towards a lady of rank, whom I will
never compromise; secondly, towards her sister, an Abbess, because she
learned thorough bass of me; thirdly, towards...; fourthly, towards the
wife of the Court Chaplain, who, it is true, is hectic but aesthetic,
and who loved too much rather than too little _embellishment upon_ the
piano (in the local sense of the proposition), and polished, covered
and set out the instrument to the finest effect; fifthly, with the lady
of the Minister-resident, von Bouse, who has not the least idea of the
fact, and at whose hips and charms I was actually stupid with
admiration, till I fortunately detected her indiscriminate coquetry and
her infidelity to her incognito lover; sixthly, with the whole Court of
Scheerau, where, according to the right of the _dead hand_, I looked
upon the reception of a live hand, which offered itself for a pupil of
mine, as an investment of the whole heart and goods; seventhly, even
with a veritable child, Beata (the above mentioned daughter of Roeper),
for whom I, once a week in bad weather, and for an equally poor salary,
ran out into the country, and with whom one could absolutely think of
nothing else but love. In short, there is nothing, leaf-buds,
blossom-buds, blossoms, fruits, with which a man does not get entangled
who is a teacher of the piano.
Now comes the Man of the World. I cannot, to be sure, show myself
personally to my readers (of whom I should be glad to have the
population and exact tabulated statement); but the people of Scheerau,
before whom this leaf comes, are hereby challenged to speak out their
thoughts and decide whether a man who gives the great world three piano
lessons daily is any more its teacher than its scholar. Dignity, grace
of gait, taste in dress, attitudes, perpendicular, horizontal and
diagonal, are not, to be sure, the required merits of an author (though
they are of the fine gentleman), and cannot be printed; but this much
only I contend for, that it is only at a court one learns all this,
especially when he has some influence and takes part as a player,
whether at the Hombre table or at the piano table,[26] which, like many
a breast at the court, under the dumb wooden surface, conceals a sweet
stringed instrument. Of course, when one walks up and down in his study
again, among great books and great men, accompanied by the whole
republican past, uplifted to the profound perspective of the infinite
world beyond the grave, then even the possessor of them despises his
shells of empty distinctions. He asks himself: Is there nothing better
than to be master over his body (instead of over his passions) and to
carry it as lightly as after the first three glasses of champagne--to
tone down his style to the universal style, because at courts and at
pianos no key must sound out above another--to glide along on the thin
_joggling board_ of female fancies with such a flying touch that our
steps merely accompany the swaying--to dance and walk elegantly, so far
as is practicable with one long leg (for, of course, if a piano teacher
has to contend with a short leg, the Old Boy may stand on both if he
can, as gracefully as the Prince of Artois)--in short, to sublimate all
sense into nonsense, all truths into concerts, all honest feelings into
pantomimic parodies? Nothing better is there? Ask the perambulator of
the study. There _is_ something far better--to be a tutor in Auenthal
to such a child of heaven as Gustavus is, and put the whole vagary in
print.