quandoque bonus dormitat Schmelzlaeus!_--ED.]
_Quo_, says Livy, xii. 5, and with great justice, _quo timoris minus
est, eo minus ferme periculi est_, The less fear you have, the less
danger you are likely to be in. With equal justice I invert the maxim,
and say: The less the danger, the smaller the fear; nay, there may be
situations, in which one has absolutely no knowledge of fear; and, among
these, mine is to be reckoned. The more hateful, therefore, must that
calumny about hare-heartedness appear to me.
To my Holidays' Journey I shall prefix a few facts, which prove how
easily foresight--that is to say, when a person would not resemble the
stupid marmot, that will even attack a man on horseback--may pass for
cowardice. For the rest, I wish only that I could with equal ease wipe
away a quite different reproach, that of being a foolhardy desperado;
though I trust, in the sequel, I shall be able to advance some facts
which invalidate it.
What boots the heroic arm, without a hero's eye? The former readily
grows stronger and more nervous; but the latter is not so soon ground
sharper, like glasses. Nevertheless, the merits of foresight obtain from
the mass of men less admiration (nay, I should say, more ridicule) than
those of courage. Whoso, for instance, shall see me walking under quite
cloudless skies, with a wax-cloth umbrella over me, to him I shall
probably appear ridiculous, so long as he is not aware that I carry this
umbrella as a thunder-screen, to keep off any bolt out of the blue
heaven (whereof there are several examples in the history of the Middle
Ages) from striking me to death. My thunder-screen, in fact, is exactly
that of Reimarus: on a long walking-stick, I carry the wax-cloth roof;
from the peak of which depends a string of gold-lace as a conductor; and
this, by means of a key fastened to it, which it trails along the
ground, will lead off every possible bolt, and easily distribute it over
the whole superficies of the Earth. With this _Paratonnerre Portatif_
in my hand, I can walk about for weeks, under the clear sky, without the
smallest danger. This Diving-bell, moreover, protects me against
something else; against shot. For who, in the latter end of Harvest,
will give me black on white that no lurking ninny of a sportsman
somewhere, when I am out enjoying Nature, shall so fire off his piece,
at an angle of 45 deg., that in falling down again, the shot needs only
light directly on my crown, and so come to the same as if I had been
shot through the brain from a side?
[Note 21: Schiller and Klopstock are Poetic Mirrors held up to the
Sun-god: the Mirrors reflect the Sun with such dazzling brightness, that
you cannot find the Picture of the World imaged forth in them.]
It is bad enough, at any rate, that we have nothing to guard us from the
Moon; which at present is bombarding us with stones like a very Turk:
for this paltry little Earth's trainbearer and errand-maid thinks, in
these rebellious times, that she too must begin, forsooth, to sling
somewhat against her Mother! In good truth, as matters stand, any young
Catechist of feeling may go out o' nights, with whole limbs, into the
moonshine, a-meditating; and ere long (in the midst of his meditation
the villanous Satellite hits him) come home a pounded jelly. By heaven!
new proofs of courage are required of us on every hand! No sooner have
we, with great effort, got thunder-rods manufactured, and comet-tails
explained away, than the enemy opens new batteries in the Moon, or
somewhere else in the Blue!
Suffice one other story to manifest how ludicrous the most serious
foresight, with all imaginable inward courage, often externally appears
in the eyes of the many. Equestrians are well acquainted with the
dangers of a horse that runs away. My evil star would have it, that I
should once in Vienna get upon a hack-horse; a pretty enough
honey-coloured nag, but old and hard-mouthed as Satan; so that the
beast, in the next street, went off with me; and this in truth--only at
a _walk_. No pulling, no tugging, took effect; I, at last, on the back
of this Self-riding-horse, made signals of distress, and cried: "Stop
him, good people, for God's sake stop him, my horse is off!" But these
simple persons seeing the beast move along as slowly as a Reichshofrath
law-suit, or the Daily Postwagen, could not in the least understand the
matter, till I cried as if possessed: "Stop him then, ye blockheads and
joltheads; don't you see that I cannot hold the nag?" But now, to these
noodles, the sight of a hard-mouthed horse going off with its rider step
by step, seemed ridiculous rather than otherwise; half Vienna gathered
itself like a comet-tail behind my beast and me. Prince Kaunitz, the
best horseman of the century (the last), pulled up to follow me. I
myself sat and swam like a perpendicular piece of drift-ice on my
honey-coloured nag, which stalked on, on, step by step: a many-cornered,
red-coated letter-carrier, was delivering his letters, to the right and
left, in the various stories, and he still crossed over before me again,
with satirical features, because the nag went along too slowly. The
Schwanzschleuderer, or Train-dasher (the person, as you know, who drives
along the streets with a huge barrel of water, and besplashes them with
a leathern pipe of three ells long from an iron trough), came across the
haunches of my horse, and, in the course of his duty, wetted both these
and myself in a very cooling manner, though, for my part, I had too much
cold sweat on me already, to need any fresh refrigeration. On my
infernal Trojan Horse (only I myself was Troy, not beridden but riding
to destruction), I arrived at Malzlein (a suburb of Vienna), or perhaps,
so confused were my senses, it might be quite another range of streets.
At last, late in the dusk, I had to turn into the Prater; and here, long
after the Evening Gun, to my horror, and quite against the police-rules,
keep riding to and fro on my honey-coloured nag; and possibly I might
even have passed the night on him, had not my brother-in-law, the
Dragoon, observed my plight, and so found me still sitting firm as a
rock on my runaway steed. He made no ceremonies; caught the brute; and
put the pleasant question: Why I had not vaulted, and come off by
ground-and-lofty tumbling? though he knew full well, that for this a
wooden-horse, which stands still, is requisite. However, he took me
down; and so, after all this riding, horse and man got home with whole
skins and unbroken bones.
But now at last to my Journey!
[Note 34: Women are like precious carved works of ivory; nothing is
whiter and smoother, and nothing sooner grows _yellow_.]
[Note 72: The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the
latter by the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on; but not the
Whole-learned by the Half-learned.]
_Journey to Flaetz_.
You are aware, my friends, that this Journey to Flaetz was necessarily to
take place in Vacation time; not only because the Cattle-market, and
consequently the Minister and General von Schabacker, was there then;
but more especially, because the latter (as I had it positively from a
private hand) did annually, on the 23d of July, the market-eve, about
five o'clock, become so full of gaudium and graciousness, that in many
cases he did not so much snarl on people, as listen to them, and grant
their prayers. The cause of this gaudium I had rather not trust to
paper. In short, my Petition, praying that he would be pleased to
indemnify and reward me, as an unjustly deposed Army-chaplain, by a
Catechetical Professorship, could plainly be presented to him at no
better season, than exactly about five o'clock in the evening of the
first dog-day. In less than a week, I had finished writing my Petition.
As I spared neither summaries nor copies of it, I had soon got so far as
to see the relatively best lying completed before me; when, to my
terror, I observed, that, in this paper, I had introduced above thirty
_dashes_, or breaks, in the middle of my sentences! Nowadays, alas,
these stings shoot forth involuntarily from learned pens, as from the
tails of wasps. I debated long within myself whether a private scholar
could justly be entitled to approach a minister with dashes,--greatly as
this level interlineation of thoughts, these horizontal note-marks of
poetical _music_-pieces, and these rope-ladders or Achilles' tendons of
philosophical _see_-pieces, are at present fashionable and
indispensable: but, at last, I was obliged (as erasures may offend
people of quality) to write my best proof-petition over again; and then
to afflict myself for another quarter of an hour over the name Attila
Schmelzle, seeing it is always my principle that this and the address of
the letter, the two cardinal points of the whole, can never be written
legibly enough.
[Note 35: _Bien ecouter c'est presque repondre_, says Marivaux
justly of social circles: but I extend it to round Councillor-tables and
Cabinet-tables, where reports are made, and the Prince listens.]
_First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstaedten._
The 22d of July, or Wednesday, about five in the afternoon, was now, by
the way-bill of the regular Post-coach, irrevocably fixed for my
departure. I had still half a day to order my house; from which, for two
nights and two days and a half, my breast, its breastwork and palisado,
was now, along with my Self, to be withdrawn. Besides this, my good wife
Bergelchen, as I call my Teutoberga, was immediately to travel after me,
on Friday the 24th, in order to see and to make purchases at the yearly
Fair; nay, she was ready to have gone along with me, the faithful
spouse. I therefore assembled my little knot of domestics, and
promulgated to them the Household Law and Valedictory Rescript, which,
after my departure, in the first place _before_ the outset of my wife,
and in the second place _after_ this outset, they had rigorously to
obey; explaining to them especially whatever, in case of conflagrations,
house-breakings, thunder-storms, or transits of troops, it would behove
them to do. To my wife I delivered an inventory of the best goods in our
little Registership; which goods she, in case the house took fire, had,
in the first place, to secure. I ordered her, in stormy nights (the
peculiar thief-weather), to put our Eolian harp in the window, that so
any villanous prowler might imagine I was fantasying on my instrument,
and therefore awake: for like reasons, also, to take the house-dog
within doors by day, that he might sleep then, and so be livelier at
night. I farther counselled her to have an eye on the focus of every
knot in the panes of the stable-window, nay, on every glass of water she
might set down in the house; as I had already often recounted to her
examples of such accidental burning-glasses having set whole buildings
in flames. I then appointed her the hour when she was to set out on
Friday morning to follow me; and recapitulated more emphatically the
household precepts, which, prior to her departure, she must afresh
inculcate on her domestics. My dear, heart-sound, blooming Berga
answered her faithful lord, as it seemed very seriously: "Go thy ways,
little old one; it shall all be done as smooth as velvet. Wert thou but
away! There is no end of thee!" Her brother, my brother-in-law the
Dragoon, for whom, out of complaisance, I had paid the coach-fare, in
order to have in the vehicle along with me a stout swordsman and hector,
as spiritual relative and bully-rock, so to speak; the Dragoon, I say,
on hearing these my regulations, puckered up (which I easily forgave the
wild soldier and bachelor) his sunburnt face considerably into ridicule,
and said: "Were I in thy place, sister, I should do what I liked, and
then afterwards take a peep into these regulation-papers of his."
[Note 17: The Bed of Honour, since so frequently whole regiments
lie on it, and receive their last unction, and last honour but one,
really ought from time to time to be new-filled, beaten and sunned.]
[Note 120: Many a one becomes a free-spoken Diogenes, not when he
dwells in the Cask, but when the Cask dwells in him.]
[Note 3: Culture makes whole lands, for instance Germany, Gaul, and
others, physically warmer, but spiritually colder.]
"O!" answered I, "misfortune may conceal itself like a scorpion in any
corner: I might say, we are like children, who, looking at their gaily
painted toy-box, soon pull off the lid, and, pop! out springs a mouse
who has young ones."
"Mouse, mouse!" said he, stepping up and down. "But, good brother, it is
five o'clock; and you will find, when you return, that all looks exactly
as it does today; the dog like the dog, and my sister like a pretty
woman: _allons donc!_" It was purely his blame that I, fearing his
misconceptions, had not previously made a sort of testament.
I now packed-in two different sorts of medicines, heating as well as
cooling, against two different possibilities; also my old splints for
arm or leg breakages, in case the coach overset; and (out of foresight)
two times the money I was likely to need. Only here I could have wished,
so uncertain is the stowage of such things, that I had been an Ape with
cheek-pouches, or some sort of Opossum with a natural bag, that so I
might have reposited these necessaries of existence in pockets which
were sensitive. Shaving is a task I always go through before setting out
on journeys; having a rational mistrust against stranger bloodthirsty
barbers: but, on this occasion, I retained my beard; since, however
close shaved, it would have grown again by the road to such a length
that I could have fronted no Minister and General with it.
With a vehement emotion, I threw myself on the pith-heart of my Berga,
and, with a still more vehement one, tore myself away: in her, however,
this our first marriage-separation seemed to produce less lamentation
than triumph, less consternation than rejoicing; simply because she
turned her eye not half so much on the parting, as on the meeting, and
the journey after me, and the wonders of the Fair. Yet she threw and
hung herself on my somewhat long and thin neck and body, almost
painfully, being indeed a too fleshy and weighty load, and said to me:
"Whisk thee off quick, my charming Attel (Attila), and trouble thy head
with no cares by the way, thou singular man! A whiff or two of ill luck
we can stand, by God's help, so long as my father is no beggar. And for
thee, Franz," continued she, turning with some heat to her brother, "I
leave my Attel on thy soul: thou well knowest, thou wild fly, what I
will do, if thou play the fool, and leave him anywhere in the lurch."
Her meaning here was good, and I could not take it ill: to you also, my
Friends, her wealth and her open-heartedness are nothing new.
[Note 1: The more Weakness the more Lying: Force goes straight; any
cannonball with holes or cavities in it goes crooked.]
Melted into sensibility, I said: "Now, Berga, if there be a reunion
appointed for us, surely it is either in Heaven or in Flaetz; and I hope
in God, the latter." With these words, we whirled stoutly away. I looked
round through the back-window of the coach at my good little village of
Neusattel, and it seemed to me, in my melting mood, as if its steeples
were rising aloft like an epitaphium over my life, or over my body,
perhaps to return a lifeless corpse. "How will it all be," thought I,
"when thou at last, after two or three days, comest back?" And now I
noticed my Bergelchen looking after us from the garret-window. I leaned
far out from the coach-door, and her falcon eye instantly distinguished
my head; kiss on kiss she threw with both hands after the carriage, as
it rolled down into the valley. "Thou true-hearted wife," thought I,
"how is thy lowly birth, by thy spiritual new-birth, made forgettable,
nay remarkable!"
I must confess, the assemblage and conversational picnic of the
stage-coach was much less to my taste: the whole of them suspicious,
unknown rabble, whom (as markets usually do) the Flaetz cattle-market was
alluring by its scent. I dislike becoming acquainted with strangers: not
so my brother-in-law, the Dragoon; who now, as he always does, had in a
few minutes elbowed himself into close quarters with the whole
ragamuffin posse of them. Beside me sat a person who, in all human
probability, was a Harlot; on her breast, a Dwarf intending to exhibit
himself at the Fair; on the other side was a Ratcatcher gazing at me;
and a Blind Passenger,[3] in a red mantle, had joined us down in the
valley. No one of them, except my brother-in-law, pleased me. That
rascals among these people would not study me and my properties and
accidents, to entangle me in their snares, no man could be my surety.
In strange places, I even, out of prudence, avoid looking long up at any
jail-window; because some losel, sitting behind the bars, may in a
moment call down out of mere malice: "How goes it, comrade Schmelzle?"
or farther, because any lurking catchpole may fancy I am planning a
rescue for some confederate above. From another sort of prudence, little
different from this, I also make a point of never turning round when any
booby calls, Thief! behind me.
[Note 38: Epictetus advises us to travel, because our old
acquaintances, by the influence of shame, impede our transition to
higher virtues; as a bashful man will rather lay aside his provincial
accent in some foreign quarter, and then return wholly purified to his
own countrymen: in our days, people of rank and virtue follow this
advice, but inversely; and travel because their old acquaintances, by
the influence of shame, would too much deter them from new sins.]
[Note 3: 'Live Passenger,' 'Nip;' a passenger taken up only by
Jarvie's authority, and for Jarvie's profit.--ED.]
As to the Dwarf himself, I had no objection to his travelling with me
whithersoever he pleased; but he thought to raise a particular
delectation in our minds, by promising that his Pollux and Brother in
Trade, an extraordinary Giant, who was also making for the Fair to
exhibit himself, would by midnight, with his elephantine pace,
infallibly overtake the coach, and plant himself among us, or behind on
the outside. Both these noodles, it appeared, are in the habit of going
in company to fairs, as reciprocal exaggerators of opposite magnitudes:
the Dwarf is the convex magnifying-glass of the Giant, the Giant the
concave diminishing-glass of the Dwarf. Nobody expressed much joy at the
prospective arrival of this Anti-dwarf, except my brother-in-law, who
(if I may venture on a play of words) seems made, like a clock, solely
for the purpose of _striking_, and once actually said to me: "That if in
the Upper world he could not get a soul to curry and towzle by a time,
he would rather go to the Under, where most probably there would be
plenty of cuffing and to spare." The Ratcatcher, besides the
circumstance that no man can prepossess us much in his favour, who lives
solely by poisoning, like this Destroying Angel of rats, this
mouse-Atropos; and also, which is still worse, that such a fellow bids
fair to become an increaser of the vermin kingdom, the moment he may
cease to be a lessener of it; besides all this, I say, the present
Ratcatcher had many baneful features about him: first, his stabbing
look, piercing you like a stiletto; then the lean sharp bony visage,
conjoined with his enumeration of his considerable stock of poisons;
then (for I hated him more and more) his sly stillness, his sly smile,
as if in some corner he noticed a mouse, as he would notice a man! To
me, I declare, though usually I take not the slightest exception against
people's looks, it seemed at last as if his throat were a Dog-grotto, a
_Grotta del cane_, his cheek-bones cliffs and breakers, his hot breath
the wind of a calcining furnace, and his black hairy breast a kiln for
parching and roasting.
[Note 32: Our Age (by some called the Paper Age, as if it were made
from the rags of some better-dressed one) is improving in so far, as it
now tears its rags rather into Bandages than into Papers; although, or
because, the Rag-hacker (the Devil as they call it) will not altogether
be at rest. Meanwhile, if Learned Heads transform themselves into Books,
Crowned Heads transform and coin themselves into Government-paper: in
Norway, according to the _Universal Indicator_, the people have even
paper-houses; and in many good German States, the Exchequer Collegium
(to say nothing of the Justice Collegium) keeps its own paper-mills, to
furnish wrappage enough for the meal of its wind-mills. I could wish,
however, that our Collegiums would take pattern from that Glass
Manufactory at Madrid, in which (according to Baumgartner) there were
indeed nineteen clerks stationed, but also eleven workmen.]
Nor was I far wrong, I believe; for soon after this, he began quite
coolly to inform the company, in which were a dwarf and a female, that,
in his time, he had, not without enjoyment, run ten men through the
body; had with great convenience hewed off a dozen men's arms; slowly
split four heads, torn out two hearts, and more of the like sort; while
none of them, otherwise persons of spirit, had in the least resisted:
"but why?" added he, with a poisonous smile, and taking the hat from his
odious bald pate: "I am invulnerable. Let any one of the company that
chooses lay as much fire on my bare crown as he likes, I shall not mind
it."
My brother-in-law, the Dragoon, directly kindled his tinder-box, and put
a heap of the burning matter on the Ratcatcher's pole; but the fellow
stood it, as if it had been a mere picture of fire, and the two looked
expectingly at one another; and the former smiled very foolishly,
saying: "It was simply pleasant to him, like a good warming-plaster; for
this was always the wintry region of his body."
Here the Dragoon groped a little on the naked scull, and cried with
amazement, that "it was as cold as a knee-pan."
But now the fellow, to our horror, after some preparations, actually
lifted off the quarter-scull and held it out to us, saying: "He had
sawed it off a murderer, his own having accidentally been broken;" and
withal explained, that the stabbing and arm-cutting he had talked of was
to be understood as a jest, seeing he had merely done it in the
character of Famulus at an Anatomical Theatre. However, the jester
seemed to rise little in favour with any of us; and for my part, as he
put his brain-lid and sham-scull on again, I thought to myself; "This
dungbed-bell has changed its place indeed, but not the hemlock it was
made to cover."
Farther, I could not but reckon it a suspicious circumstance, that he as
well as all the company (the Blind Passenger too) were making for this
very Flaetz, to which I myself was bound: much good I could not expect of
this; and, in truth, turning home again would have been as pleasant to
me as going on, had I not rather felt a pleasure in defying the future.
I come now to the red-mantled Blind Passenger; most probably an _Emigre_
or _Refugie_; for he speaks German not worse than he does French; and
his name, I think, was _Jean Pierre_ or _Jean Paul_, or some such thing,
if indeed he had any name. His red cloak, notwithstanding this his
identity of colour with the Hangman, would in itself have remained
heartily indifferent to me, had it not been for this singular
circumstance, that he had already five times, contrary to all
expectation, come upon me in five different towns (in great Berlin, in
little Hof, in Coburg, Meiningen and Bayreuth), and each of these times
had looked at me significantly enough, and then gone his ways. Whether
this _Jean Pierre_ is dogging me with hostile intent or not, I cannot
say; but to our fancy, at any rate, no object can be gratifying that
thus, with corps of observation, or out of loopholes, holds and aims at
us with muskets, which for year after year it shall move to this side
and that, without our knowing on whom it is to fire. Still more
offensive did Redcloak become to me, when he began to talk about his
soft mildness of soul; a thing which seemed either to betoken pumping
you or undermining you.