children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me
the bundle to the village: run about, and seek thee a little bird, as
thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time."
For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer
and gentleman-in-waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.
He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with
coloured beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the
morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of
jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew
the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might not skip away too
far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not
in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians--for
geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our
Quintus farthermore got by heart the few fields, on which the grain was
already reaped.
But now roam slower, Fixlein, through his Lordship's garden of Hukelum;
not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy
good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about
her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of
her, that she means first to iron this same band: they cannot know that
she has no maid; and that today the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money
purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be
arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the
Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the _Tiers Etat_, being
neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait
all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye;
since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well
as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed
overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaeus. Could she ever
tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping
her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or
Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought
Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had
nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens,
merely smelling at it?
"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedaeus!" said the mother, giving an
embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who, had ducked
past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking,
suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the
smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the
soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which
lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and
the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and
butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room: but I suppose I
have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber
than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The
owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion;
as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept
no gardener.
But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being
bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all times
a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was
a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was
contented he should go: these good women think they enjoy their guests,
if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger
church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood,
standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the
coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in
their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among
them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his
face: Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit
Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring
Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not
explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind
the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a
church-library of consequence--no schoolboy could have buckled it wholly
in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did
it not consist of the Polyglott in folio, which he, spurred on by
Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early
years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae_, _majusculae_,
_minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not
at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this
alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your
Oriental Rhizophagi (Root-eaters) are tied, especially as here they get
so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not
close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day,
the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down
the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our
Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the
Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them, it will be little
less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they
say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both
already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake
which Fraeulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the
first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is?
She is,--for if (according to Lessing) in the very excellence of the
Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will
apply to the fate of several authors, for instance to my own; but an
authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her
baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not
much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near
relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not
even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine;
inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen
void disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to
the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other
mansion of Schadeck: on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers
and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God,--which, in the
thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she
lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn
Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her
husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette lay a
sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured:
her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous and
timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most
cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some
days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply
to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add,
that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his
school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him
for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba Anomala_
along with him.
The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work
of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of
hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and
of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as
belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his
platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks
enough.
Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party,--for the Shock with
his cover under the stove cannot be omitted,--now began their Feast of
Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honour for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in
the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not,
like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the
hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maison-bouche_ I do not reckon) in
his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a
Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387
livres 21 sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.
Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal
cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The
most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather
from this meal, consist of here and there an edifying piece of
table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she
mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of
white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle: but, adds she, it
will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her
cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and
sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each
other nothing, save only clothes, husbands and flax. In the fancy of the
Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were
sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette: for him a
garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts and
the first principles were wanting: he honoured these wrappages and hulls
of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because
it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others
honouring. Farther, the good mother read to him, as it were, the
monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of
Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain
not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the
reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.
The fairest piece of news was, that Fraeulein Thiennette had sent word
today: "he might visit Her Ladyship tomorrow, as My Lord, his godfather,
was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Aufhammer
was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's godfather: but he,--though the
Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly
offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes,--had frugally made him no
christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the
very balefulest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by
reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants,
run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college,--when he and
his dog, as ill luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood.
Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant:
"Coosh, Schil" (_Couche, Gilles_), it must apparently have been the
Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees
and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his
name,--for Gilles means Egidius,--must fall directly into his ear.
Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal: he knew
not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word, which, in Paris,
even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their _valets
de chiens_. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never
recalled; his error, his anger and his word. The provokee, therefore,
determined that the plebeian provoker and honour-stealer should never
more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the
garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading
towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the
Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and
towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every
house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now when the mother had long enough
kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying
his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the
_Litteratur-zeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble
joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go
forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without
reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than
bald-headed teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger,
eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A
schoolman, that expects to become a professor, will scarcely deign to
cast an eye on a pastor; but one, who is himself looking up to a
parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value
such a character. The new parsonage,--as if it had, like a _Casa Santa_,
come flying out of Erlangen, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and
alighted in Hukelum,--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the
Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself, was a thought
overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time
in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping
over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.
The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_: people
of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other,
namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and
Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior
made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to
the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much
to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still
half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so: but joyful
remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant
remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
Courteously and kindly did Zebedaeus (who could not even enter in his
Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr
before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who
in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for
the Hippocrene than for Guk-guk.[34]
[34] A university beer.
Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up,
close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of
strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith
such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who
considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper
classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom
the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that
such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous
Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may
again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the
limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred
and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus
summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral
one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This
gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his
own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had
contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same
time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole
community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without
difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their
main equipments, like Phoenixes, existed but in the singular number;
one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other
after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after
the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the
national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both
of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and
siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at
College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and
Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four
times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too
pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing
_coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just
tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all
borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor
as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and
hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the
same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues.
And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,--"_fictio
sequitur naturam_,"--it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by
direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting.
The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on
the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the
court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen
now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships
by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where,
according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of
possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now
denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost
and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with
taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the
original quit-rent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long
neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with
sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like
the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness,
while reading his lecture,--he was just come to the subject of _Forest
Salt and Coin Regalities_,--to descry, through the window of his
auditorium, a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer,
or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the
incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last
descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and
animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard
below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport
sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
[35] From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the
whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full
force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his
house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be
made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written
commands of the Pope; the neighbourhood must indemnify him for what
is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance,
the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor
is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten
houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered;
his legacies are not abridged by _falcidia_, &c. &c.
Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple
sounding-holes; and by the road, courteously took off his hat before the
empty windows of the Castle: houses of quality were to him like persons
of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the
god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with
authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her
historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the
white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare
penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in
the good graces of the Fraeulein; for women feel their hearts much more
attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of his
benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father;
perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their
experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons
mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing
tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction like an order of
nobility does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother;
as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows
into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.
There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that
of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into
_Resonance_ together.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and
that instead of the whole dinner fragments which tomorrow might
themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding
was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child
would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people,
now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors
and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crum of the
precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But
the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday,
and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.
Fixlein,--the counterpart of great men and geniuses,--was inclined to
treat, to gift, to gratify a serving house-mate, rather than a man who
is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next
post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last
postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honour in him, and
notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly
gave it away in cases of honour, and unwillingly in cases of
overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his
heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was
exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were peacefully
resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the
company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except
Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[36] he could not figure: the
Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like
the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by
reading, as it were levied a tithe.
[36] _Literary Germany_; a work (I believe of no great merit) which
Richter often twitches in the same style.--ED.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he
did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for
he had still much to do.
After supper, he was just about visiting the Fraeulein, when he descried
her in person, like a lily dipt in the red twilight, in the
Castle-garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern
one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to
the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was
ever there, &c. &c.,--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and
faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.