out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we
went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling
canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would
he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his
names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius
Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a
month, and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with
whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a
foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them?--
In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at
solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at
them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and
seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to
sound the organ,--an honour never paid to any other child in
Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted
Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer,
and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest
the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head,
and my lungs full of sighs; and, to the silent darling lying in my arms,
whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of
the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his
Future also as soft a sleep as today; and as good an angel as today, but
a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with
invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through
its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[63] and all its storms and
perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I
saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy
trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of
the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not
restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide
for the child if its parents died,--am I not to be excused if I then
cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running
over?--For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow
pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the
poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a
freer one, to bend and cramp himself ere long more harshly in the strait
arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies and errors and sins;
of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought
that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a
man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All
the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with
them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But
the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody
point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a
woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the
describing of the baptism be over for today, and proceed again
tomorrow....
[63] The Wild Hunter, _Wilde Jaeger_, is a popular spectre of
Germany.--ED.
FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
O, so is it ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little
plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent
of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake,
what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last night, I little
thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert
already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.
Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old
steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last
repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my
presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I
tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new
Ball, was waiting for him in the old one? that in the register of
contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for
his new-born son Egidius"?--
This stroke sank deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder:
in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after
such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in
the bright smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts
snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the
monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in
whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.
But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though
deadly cold, laid the leaves together;--looked softly and firmly over
the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to
be distinguished;--gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a
white overarching laurel-tree half screened from his sight;--and though
he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused
at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were
his last.
At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but from the breaking of
a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck
without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels
rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all
the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now to his
eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered
on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to
and fro, and in the charnel-house there was a motion and a tumult.
His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed
his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew
aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased
these hollow fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow.
Then at last from transparent thoughts grew coloured visions, and he
dreamed this dream: He was standing at the window looking out into the
churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and
seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the
graves, and said: "They are my bones;" and he took a spine and the
bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with
them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on.
Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried:
"Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I
will tap on thy heart with it." The skeleton, thus piled together, now
looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir
from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sandglass, the
ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a
dagger, far into the air....
Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high
as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,--and
stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder,
and vapours floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up
from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clam of the
grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups
wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe and cloak were
gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red
lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent,
rosebalm-dipt flesh, like the splendour of an Angel flying hither from
the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut
snow-white eyelids....
The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in
bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were
pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled
away.----
But not his life: he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold of
his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.
The fever abated towards morning: but the certainty of dying still
throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair
little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it
began to cry, too hard against his paternal heavy-laden breast. Then
towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within
it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were,
arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those
tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand
striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more
easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it
smites into discord the firm-set strings.
But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like
fire-pillars round his soul: every artery became a burning-rod, and the
heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul
grew bloody: the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the
blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody
rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of
betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was
for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one
more than to see a reasonable moderate man, who has been so even in his
passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save
this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the
reek and thick vapour of a boiling nervous-spirit, and the hissing
water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul,
a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor
bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun--is it more just to
complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when
about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and
darkens the other eye that sees?
But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips,
though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony,
nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent
movement of a tortured frame that I see in her; but what I am forced to
see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathising heart, is a pale,
still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale bloodless head, which Sorrow is
as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the
axe of the headsman; for, O! on this form the wounds, from which the
three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and
the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O
Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is
saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on
Earth; now do I give over hoping--would this life were but soon done."
You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours
ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had
always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this
superstition with a nobler one: she had purposely stood farther back at
the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than
he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might
also die sooner. Nay, she has determined if he die, to lay with his
corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to
keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but
thou unhappy one!--
CHAPTER LAST.
I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as
the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady.
It first occurred to me, that as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by
convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another;
namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a
man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all
dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I
accordingly directed every one to leave the patient: only his mother,
while the fiercest meteors were dancing and hissing before his fevered
soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a
child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She
did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he
cried: "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me,
to eat my heart," she said to him: "Little dear, I will give thee thy
roller-hat, and thy copybook, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again,
and more too, if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have
taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.
At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow, dissimulation
becomes easy: "Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy
playthings: but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in
the bed so, with the small-pox on thee!" And with this, from her full
apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and
dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother.
First of all his copybook, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down
his name, which he necessarily recognised as his own handwriting; then
the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white
leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin-leaves;
his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis
pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nuernberg puppets....
The sick man recognised in a moment these projecting peaks of a
spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk
of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly
time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to
even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned round
his head, as if he were awakening from a long heavy dream; and his whole
heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said, fixing his full
eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and brother still
living, then?"--"They are dead lately," said the wounded mother; but her
heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes, and bitter tears
fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once that evening, when
he lay confined to bed by the death of his father, and was cured by his
playthings, overflowed his soul with splendour and lights, and presence
of the past.
And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and
fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its
plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far
distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds,--O,
his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering
flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt
away, but only into dewdrops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into
blooddrops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating,
drinking and swimming in the warm relaxing rose-perfume of the brightest
delusion....
The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm.
Next morning, his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would
have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second Sunday
was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my presence) was
averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if we moved the
month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's Dial) eight days
forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and look at his clock
for the day of the month, than to turn it up in the Almanac. I for my
own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked him: "If he was
cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad death-dreams, when he
had lain so long, and passed clean over the Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out
of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"
A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In his
anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I
forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble
enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster: last night, he let them persuade
him he was little older than his own son: here is the child's fall-hat
he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said:
"Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times,
there was a maggot in your head about this?"--
At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew
better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good
deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word
of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....
--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got
better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday
could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read,
instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar
next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his
recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in
the afternoon.
This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and
then, with the pantagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and
draw on the great scale.
During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal
tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his
recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he
deserved it: for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than
without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every child;
was none of those clergy, who never pardon their enemies except
in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife and
himself.
I then attended at his afternoon's catechising; and looked down (as he
did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the
wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and shifted a
little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white
Psalm-ciphers,[64] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was well
aware, that when I today, on the twenty-fifth of May, retired from this
_Salernic_[65] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the
thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign
mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far
more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness, than the whole
Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first
impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press:
[64] Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.--ED.
[65] Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as
in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with
his _Lexicon-Commentary_.--ED.
"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring
disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring
it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we
should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also: and
if flies often buz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse
ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[66] feed
them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a
natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love
without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to
enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do
the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the
_same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by
higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise
anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_
can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_
will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from
second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence,
and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness
itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is
nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was
once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake in no lotteries,--keep at
home,--give and accept no pompous entertainments,--travel not abroad
every year!--Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household
goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst
enjoy it!--Inspect the neighbourhood of thy life; every shelf, every
nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and
most domestic winding of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a
collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame
as the talk of neighbours at the street-door; a library as a learned
conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and
three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"----
[66] This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my
readers.--ED.
And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behove me not to
make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man,
to let it sound out.
After the Catechising, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned
gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places,
perused the plates on the pews,--I took a lesson on the altar on its
inscription incrusted with the _sediment of Time_ (I speak not
metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted
the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other
rose-shoot, which, in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the
rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden
Apostle, the name _Lavater_, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been
pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring.
Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently
in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there, but
also in his _Hand-Library_;[67] and met with it besides in many country
churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of
this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a
shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my
gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing
it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among his
_curiosa_.
[67] A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by
him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he
intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing;
these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the
reading of manuscript than of print.
On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the
design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the
acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I
would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to
the proposed meal ... and truly the Biographer at length got his way,
all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.