levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death
beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens
thinks of nothing more important, than of who shall be the gossips, and
what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst
nobler thoughts, though these too along with them. The still-hidden
darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel
sculptured on a grave-stone, and pointing with its small finger to the
hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening, thou
thoughtest of death, with a certainty, of which I yet knew not the
reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave
where man's blood like stalactitic water drops down, and in dropping
raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And
that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft
eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child: but thou
repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with
new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and saidst: "Be
as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!--But
I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee.".... Lay thy
hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou kind Fate,
never lift thine away from them!--
It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair
friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of
their altar sparks fly over to me: but what is this to our sympathetic
exaltation, when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden,
bound to the same duties, animated by the same care for the same little
darlings--fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour?
And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the
mourning-weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now
grown colourless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns
have marred into images of Sorrow;--when these two clasp each other with
such wearied aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and
when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love--O, we have
lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to
Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"--does not all
within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither
in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand
tears, nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of
thy--beloved? It never dies: and Thou, All-good! if there were no
eternal love, there were no love at all....
To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a
transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to
Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after
time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty
weather, and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted: "the pig can
scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the
women, farther the butcher, and the day, and all _et ceteras_;
appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the
war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the battle-sword, to the
overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its
arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and
slaughter-house.
This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course
of winter, which had commenced today at two-and-twenty minutes past
eight in the morning: "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we
shall not need so much candle tomorrow night as tonight." His mother, it
is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses: but he
fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the
lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the
last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little
whether his women took him or not, he informed them in
juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but
write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands
lay the _jus circa sacra_, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and
the rather, as he hoped before newyear's day to raise a bountiful
subscription from the parish for this purpose.--If God spare us till
Spring," added he with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily
recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the Ball should be set up
at thy first church-going, dame!"
Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the
work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for
the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he
clapped his tackle to his new learned _Opus_, of which I must now afford
a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum
an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered
round like a _revenant_, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to
delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it
correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if
thereby--and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal
walls--he hoped to impart to his "_Architectural Correspondence of two
Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle_" that last polish and
_labor limae_ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical
Starchamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some
authors actually feel--or only affect, as for instance, I. From this
mouldered Robber-_Louvre_, there grew for him more flowers of joy, than
ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.--To my
knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this
no man but _Buesching_ has to answer. Fixlein had not long ago, among the
rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the
Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics
of the village. Buesching, it is true, had picked up
nothing--accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his _Geography_, is still
omitted altogether;--but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein
with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no
longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the
assafoetida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love:
both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear: but is
the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the
end of the chapter.
Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be
larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bearskin-caps,
were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this
fair _chiaroscuro_ of the day, this coloured foreground of the night, he
lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas
discourses therein: and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he
was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine
word-seeds hung round his shoulder,--hold up to him a spoonful of
alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she
should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of
roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel,
because his good-wife liked it better?--
Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his
glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his
snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold,
which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of
some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter
history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do
often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells,
append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional
landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet tonight he farther
took up the _Weekly Chronicle_ of Flachsenfingen; and amid the
bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the
roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty-Years War, he could
still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for
his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee with the
young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like
precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a
thick handsome--boy to boot!
ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
_Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth._
I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it
natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odours; and I was
looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in
the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of
flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears
full of humming from the neighbouring bee-hives. Then, methought,
advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept
into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honoured Sir, my wife
has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your
Honour_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received
into the bosom of the church."
I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily at
my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather: for Thiennette had given
him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been as
light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father
had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those
_Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the
eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail: for this stone performs,
in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk
in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in
such circumstances, who put it on....
--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show
him how the matter stood.
Such a May as the present (of 1794), Nature has not, in the memory of
man--begun: for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection
have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers
should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a
poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as
to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter, to
say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind May
of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever
made on thy rude namesakes! By Heaven! when I now issue from the
wavering chequered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am
writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad living day, and look
up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath
it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendour
of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky,
into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has today been
painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our
picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the
moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colours are laid
out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colours; under the
varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and
the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild
outlines and single tints: and so he stands at the border of the Earth,
and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys,
whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening,
and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.
But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I imitate
on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the hypochondriacal
sediment of winter: but I do not think I should have seen even the
steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say
nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened to be visiting the
Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath. From him I got
acquainted with Fixlein's history (every Candidatus must deliver an
account of his life to the Consistorium), and with his still madder
petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gaily the
cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of
life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore. It is
singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept
prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the
moment we see such, they anger us: we would have them fit us and delight
us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.
It was Saturday the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the
_Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and
in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he
was not yet--_invested_, and tomorrow this was to be done. I little
thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden,
that there I was to write another book.
I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come
springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so
courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He
looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the
_travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow: Thiennette again seemed never to have
thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty,
decorated and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed
alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of
stair-pedaling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting
in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell, over
the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the
kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good
Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of
ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from
the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title:
"_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection._" And as I looked to see
where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in
writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the
ink, and I found that all was right and good: with your fluttering
gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and
none of the home affairs, nothing (except some other things about them)
can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate,
to which I shall in due time return.
In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English
novel, than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside
Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her
face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which
white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are
similar to a similitude given in my Note;[57]--and although the blazing
wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she must have
been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at the thought
of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from her, as laid in
her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must never have
reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first rose from the
bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with philosophic reverence a
woman, whose thread of life a secret all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a
second thread, and who veils within her the transition from Nothingness
to Existence, from Eternity to Time;--but still less can a man have any
heart of flesh, if his soul, in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown
unseen being, is sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen
and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow
lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole
nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man
for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
[57] To the Spring, namely, which begins with snowdrops, and ends
with roses and pinks.--
"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that
now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must
have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the Investiture
and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find
stitched in with the _Dog-post-days_, and which had formerly been hers,
brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles
of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are
at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it
now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday
and Sunday, I could never get into the right track either with her or
him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like
obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view: this arose in
part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade
of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had
spread over her like a little cloud.
I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over
the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too
prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red
of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts
can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the
Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow,
and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the
graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this
habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift
reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?--I
perused the grave-stones; and I think even now that Superstition[58] is
right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of _memory_;
at all events, one does _forget_ a thousand things belonging to this
world....
[58] This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also
a Roman one. _Cicero de Senectute_.
The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the good shepherd, suited
well with the ceremony) I must dispatch in few words; because nothing
truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart
the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was--drinking
(in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the Choir),--reading (of the
Presentation by the Senior, and of the Ratification-rescript by the lay
Rath),--and preaching, by the Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer
by the hand, and presented, made over and guaranteed him to the
congregation, and them to him. Fixlein felt that he was departing as a
high-priest from the church, which he had entered as a country parson;
and all day he had not once the heart to ban. When a man is treated with
solemnity, he looks upon himself as a higher nature, and goes through
his solemn feasts devoutly.
This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and
Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting off
till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the people,
to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians frequently
postponed their consecration and investiture to Christianity, their
baptism namely, till the day when they died: nay, I do not even think
this clerical Investiture would lose much of its usefulness, if it and
the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved for the same day; the
rather as this usefulness consists entirely in two items; what the
Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they can pocket.
Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The
Investiture officials, and elevation pulley-men, had, throughout the
whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus: as these
gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the
latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied
and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer that, conversely,
water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking,
therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together
into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in
our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be
inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes
them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores, which Abernethy so
highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_: and can the Gullet in
their case be aught else than door-neighbour to the Windpipe, the
_consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray: I
meant to signify, that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only
that I used this air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but
for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth
at my gossip certain speeches, which betrayed devoutness: these he at
first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality.
But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images
of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air
before me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night,
which we little fire-flies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to
him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at
the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the
setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said,
the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the
world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the
resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c.
&c.
On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first
theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would
previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers
were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not
from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world, is
something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I,
moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but
had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had
got a sight of his _Life_ in the hands of the Superintendent; and might
be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would
assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-colour,--then was my silk,
which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a
kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me;
for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his power
to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher one. He
said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should mention him
in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common and too poor
for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of his
Letter-boxes; and said, perhaps, he had hereby been paving the way for
me.
The main point, however, was, he hoped that his _Errata_, his
_Exercitationes_, and his _Letters on the Robber-Castle_, if I should
previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received;
and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a
Preface.