thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with
Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account.
He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he
hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died: First, because
three Gipsies, in three different places and at three different times,
had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror.
Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own
brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties.
Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on
the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet,
and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this
Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius of
his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and with
them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right
definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked
away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny
that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty: "however," said he,
"if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may run
away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in _His_ keeping? And were
it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life of my
brother should be added to mine?"--Thus, under the cold snow of the
Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of it a
fair snow-man.
The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion; and,
like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the Quintusship
to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves, that he would soon vacate
it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy chair should
have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein; but he wished it not;
being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as Astmann's
Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more and more
widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow weather
another year, 'tis more than I expect," said Hans.
This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a Hanoverian
Postboy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian Government, enjoining
on all its Post-officers an elegant style of manners, he might have
somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus, whom no mortal disliked,
and who again could hate no mortal, he alone bore a grudge; simply
because _Fixlein_ did not write himself _Fuechslein_, and had not chosen
along with him to purchase a Patent of Nobility. The Subrector, on this
his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by a team of four specified
ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who was related to him,
clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage; and to hear him, in
the most despicable raiment, saying to the train: "He that rides there
is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind him of it." The mild
compliant Quintus never noticed this large wasp-poisonbag in the
Subrector, but took it for a honeybag; nay, by his brotherly warmness,
which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he concreted these venomous
juices into still feller consistency. The Quintus, in his simplicity,
took Fuechslein's contempt for envy of his pedagogic talents.
A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof and Petershof,
all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with (if not
despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas-eve he walks about with
a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for nothing
but--daylight: joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like
sparrows, his sleep-grains; and tonight, moreover, the registrator of
his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which,
accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
On Christmas-morn, he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but
little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish
inflation about his Quintusship: "the Quintus-post," said he to himself,
"is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I wonder how
I could parade so last night before my promotion; at present, I had more
reason." Today he ate, as on all Sundays and holydays, with the
Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To this man, Fixlein
was, what common people are _always_, but polished philosophical and
sentimental people very _seldom_ are,--_thankful_: a man thanks you the
less for presents, the more inclined he is to give presents of his own;
and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person. Meister Steinberger, in
the character of store-master, had introduced into the wire-cage of a
garret, where Fixlein, while a Student at Leipzig, was suspended, many a
well-filled trough with good canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household
bread and _Sauerkraut_. Money indeed was never to be wrung from him: it
is well known that he often sent the best calfskins gratis to the
tanner, to be boots for our Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward
himself had to bear.--On Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times
customary, a smaller damask table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser
one; the armchair; silver implements, and a wine-stoup were handed him;
mere waste, which, as the Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a
Scholar; but for a Flesher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals,
and then signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger,
"if you are made that, it is well.--Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail
of thy cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby
informing his daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle
must now be applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of
advancing all instalment-dues to his ward, at an interest of four and a
half per cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his
advancement to the Quintusship: of these the interest had to be duly
paid; yet, on the day of payment, the Quintus always got some
abatement; being wont every Sunday after dinner to instruct his
guardian's daughter in arithmetic, writing and geography. Steinberger
with justice required of his own grown-up daughter that she should know
all the towns, where he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat
oxen; and if she slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he
himself, as Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her
chair, ready, so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out
the dross from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right
ductility. The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this
account she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and
assignee of her heart. The old Flesher--simply because his wife was
dead--had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and
pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long
ago observed--what the Quintus never did--that she had a mind for the
said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their
joys: today at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become
unusually _red_.
When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to
drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at him,"
said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never cast an
eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get her; but
_we_ have done with one another: for a learned man needs quite another
sort of thing."
"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein (for this post Steinberger
filled in the provincial Militia), "such a match were far too rich, at
any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty times; and
then said to Eva, as she returned,--at the same time taking down from
the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and suspend his
slain calves: "Stop!--Hark, dost wish the present Herr Conrector here
for thy husband?"
"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flesher; "with this crook, thy
father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now
make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook
was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such
cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed the
keenlier.
Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins
Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the
Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as
with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those are
the best, which can be expressed in the smallest numbers. Nevertheless,
the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his arm: for the
notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second year, and that
so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid his Debt of
Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with their
debts--this notion he named stuff and oldwifery; he was neither
superstitious nor fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of action,
such as the common man much oftener has than your vapouring man of
letters, or your empty dainty man of rank.
* * * * *
As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few
odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life,
embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many
veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting and burnishing for
the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream of his history to
Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this
gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That
Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous: do but consider that
Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being
legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his
thirty-third year.
From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector.
The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his
Quintus-ashes, a young Phoenix combined itself together. Great
changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always date
our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from
theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as
corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has
never been aught else except a--crown-prince.
FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
_Cantata-Sunday. Two Testaments. Pontac; Blood; Love._
The Spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming fruitful,
and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over our
quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
blossoms than by snow.
In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior Astmann,
our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure it was
meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing of
funereal peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set the
curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings had
already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he required
but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with trees,
they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may exude. The
second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last: it is strange
that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic thrice.
Men are apt to postpone their _last_ will as long as their _better_ one:
the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
Thiennette, during the last night, before from sick-nurse she became
corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and of his
meagre hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
where, like a drooping yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
schoolroom between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the end.
Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears were
the fluid tints with which she coloured her picture. As the
Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependents,
and as she began with the male ones, Fixlein stood at the top; and
Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
lift his scythe and give the last stroke till his protegee had been with
audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all away, life,
testament and hopes.
When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
Shadow of this whole Earth: but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly cuts
asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder away, and
I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any more!"--And
even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the poetical sadness,
every trifle could make a division, a break in his mourning; and, like a
woman, he was that very evening capable of sketching some plans for the
future employment of his legacy.
Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was unsealed;
but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to Hukelum. His
mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed, over the corpse
for grief, over the testament for joy.--To the now Conrector Egidius
Zebedaeus was left: _In the first place_, a large sumptuous bed, with a
mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might have rolled at his ease,
and to which I and my fair readers will by and by approach nearer, to
examine it; _secondly_, there was devised to him, as unpaid
Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived, one ducat;
_thirdly_, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his elevation
to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be made good to
the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded the mother,
"what the poor Fraeulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not one brass
farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand which was just stretching
itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen against the
foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse trick of Fortune
with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy, and comes easier
to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging rather to men. In many
female hearts sympathy and envy are such near door-neighbours that they
could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell, where men have such frightful
times of it; and vicious nowhere except in Heaven, where people have
more happiness than they know what to do with.
The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his
benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off--without so much
as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his emotion--up-stairs to
see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a _female_ predilection for
furniture. I know not whether the reader ever looked at or mounted any
of these ancient chivalric beds, into which, by means of a little stair
without balustrades, you can easily ascend; and in which you, properly
speaking, sleep always at least one story above ground. Nazianzen
informs us (_Orat. XVI._) that the Jews, in old times, had high beds
with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because of vermin. The legacy
bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a flea would have
measured it not in Diameters of the Earth, but in Distances of Sirius.
When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with the curtains drawn
asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could have longed to be in
it; and had it been in his power to cut from the opaque hemisphere of
Night, at that time in America, a small section, he would have
established himself there along with it, just to swim about, for one
half hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of down. The mother,
by longer chains of reasoning and chains of calculation than the bed
was, had not succeeded in persuading him to have the broad mirror on the
top cut in pieces, though his large dressing-table had nothing to see
itself in but a mere shaving-glass: he let the mirror lie where it was
for this reason: "Should I ever, God willing, get married," said he, "I
shall then, towards morning, be able to look at my sleeping wife,
without sitting up in bed."
As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence,
his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her
evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly
the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and
passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was: but
against this _venia aetatis_, she saw too well, the authorities would
have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son
been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could
not but be presumed that he then was."
And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called, and
delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and ratification
of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold bar of
two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the voyage of his
life: Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any pettifogging
discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits
thrown to the dogs: seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the
judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such a
tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled--for, in the first place,
there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so
long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet
thirty-two[47]--from such a lock, might not only silk and hanging-cords,
but whole dragnets have been spun and twisted. Clients in general would
have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted longer:
Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical
questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that
Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space of
eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of law are
not to blame for this: on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of Truth,
that not the _finding_ but the _seeking_ of it profits men, and that he
himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in return for
the sweet labour of investigation, so is the professor of Law not
profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a
juridical truth,--which is called pleading and practising,--and he would
willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an hyperbola to
its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can subsist as an
honourable man with wife and child, let such approximation be as tedious
as it likes.
[47] As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no
other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year;
it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after
the death of the testatrix, no farthing could he claimed by him;
since, according to our notion, at the making of the testament he
was not even one year old.
The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a farther commission
from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up
the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the
coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which,
properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good to
him.
Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the
world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a
basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on,
and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound and in good
season.
I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the
reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed
Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured
the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, today the
Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his
family, came in as a farther aggravation. The mother, who should have
known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager
he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not
speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect
how stupid I felt on Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death,
not as the poet does, in the up-towering, asunder-driving concave-mirror
of Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the
woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book;
and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into
slumber in some latticed pew.--
And yet he thought oftener of him than last year: for joy readily melts
us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel
that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this
terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball,--for, in the physical and in the
moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land,--has provided for
the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us namely, a quite
special elixir against spasms in the soul: I declare this same Genius
must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor
devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the fissures
of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly prescriptions of
simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages a precious
wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour over his
slashes and bone-breakages--gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a touch of
wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards this
medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of permitted
tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do not thank
God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous vertigos of
life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy, Christianity,
Judaism, Paganism and _Time_;--liquor, as I said.
The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three
groschens of post-money, and commissioned,--for he had a whole cabinet
of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark with
his hand,--three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must have a
Cantata merrying-making," said he; "if it be my last day, let it be my
gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept the
bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a threatened
sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question is, Whether
he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if he had not
wished to treat his mother and the Fraeulein. Had he lived in the tenth
century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand, or in other
centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when, accordingly,
like sailors in a shipwreck, people bouzed up all,--he would not have
spent one kreutzer more on that account. His joy was, that with his
legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor Steinberger, and leave the
world an honest man: just people, who make much of money, pay their
debts the most punctually.