Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
is your name?--your character?--your business?"
The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
philanthropic.
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
happily get back again to our St. Luna.
A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
wholly from the simple form.
It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
presently, say I.
When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
Lordship's.
Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
syndic.
With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
the whole court that he should come back well.
Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
to add this much more:--
The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
fact he is only a country pastor.
From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
goes straight forward again.
His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
be hurled down."
"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
children, as Spitz says.)
"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
happy man labor for the unhappy."
He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
their shell, to draw something in ..."
"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
for a moment.
"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
eyes?"
Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
well."
Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
his blood and shaken his heart.
And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
"I have a request for my Flamin."
"What is it?" said his Lordship.
"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
take the pen."
The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
new question.
His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.