"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
cannot.
"Your Matthieu."
An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
womanly refinement of her character.
Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
roguish.
Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
above-mentioned court dame.
At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
glance.
The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
Crébillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
despised.
The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
out!
But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
and the teacher himself.
From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
overlook....
Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
ago, for a telescope and a horn."
Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
times wished me a horn and six verses."
The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
the stars.
Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
finery-room are all forgotten.
The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
took an early leave.
The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
by--Emanuel.
"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
death be mine!... EMANUEL."
"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.