Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious
Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
Intercalary Day.
I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
in powder, the landlord in rooms.
Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin
himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box,
from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?
Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what
else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain,
like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
your conscience!"
He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our
insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be
eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
himself to build upon?"
Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung
up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_
actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.
There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former
night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and
more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied
his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly
serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"
Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
heavens....
Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_
came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.
The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
its highest strength.
Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether
his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he
had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...
I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.
With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle
of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with
mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and
in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly
the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the
wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest
saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain
this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I
might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping
storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...
Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
have thee not?
Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly
_Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and
_planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in
the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater
ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars
would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied
anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in
its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of
books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments
almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
the former.
I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he
never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should,
he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three
o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
the following proposition." I can now proceed.
Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
open.
We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
gardens of poetry.
In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
_three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_,
_sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from
him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
once on the twelve thrones.
His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to
all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_,
and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I
scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed
sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
virtue....
Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer
(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before
their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is
the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss
it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
he had previously married.
Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
the stones of the stream of time.
So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge
soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he
had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
steps, and pitched his Cæsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
to-day no one was there, not even Mat.
"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there
were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."
Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"
Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then,
only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she
was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too
easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
not even of the time of her return.
In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have
informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_
and _con_, whether she resembled Cæsar in love or in ambition. The
clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a
prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
The great have their peculiar _grossièretés_, which the little dream
not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the
courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so
soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
&c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
_gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of
her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
letters of marque to her body.
I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her
adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
goddess, side by side with the god,--because in marrying him she
married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _assemblées_ and his
hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates
not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without
jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of
love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an
_erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....
But to return to the story.
The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former,
Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the glass at this moment flew to pieces
over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.
Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the
Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The
cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken
from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_
of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell,
_not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living
specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
near the monkey borders upon man.
A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or
deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good
institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all
vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
bore him.
The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But
to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_
fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
a fictitious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of
the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her
heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
mistaken....
... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
there is no enemy,--and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
shore,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and
the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
century after another....
Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.
The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...
When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came
from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
letter to him from his Lordship.
"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
however, to repair on the Saturday following to the _Island of
Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
_Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
residence. Farewell!" H.
"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the
Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new
correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.
"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of
city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]
from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose,
wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel
contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great
ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was
travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
in wit.
Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
_coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
with men and deference for grandees.
Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
and dancing, a day and a half out of Göttingen. The Apothecary, at his
departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.
On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are
necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put
off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among
the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must
needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
of this stone river-god,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more
sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.
"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my
study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let
a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."
To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did
remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three
well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a
coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.
She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer;
and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the
carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
gone off.
He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
touched, and read:--
"Horion!
"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
into the burning lap of morning.
"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
heaven, a sun!...
"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,--no friend
survives me,--in Europe I veil myself,--my sad history lies near the
ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in
the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
"--And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
tears?
"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou
wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
_churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
his throne?
"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest
thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a
dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
"I love thee exceedingly!
"EMANUEL."
Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this
very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and
now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
--By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
for Emanuel as stylist and as _stylite_ (in the higher sense)? And if
such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
this,--that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
a--criminal defence.--
At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
nature,--his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what
needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put
on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the _Isle
of Union_, and, what is more, on the same day, which is _one_ day
before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
journey,--really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
tolerable!--
During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,--he taught in
the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
My good hero behaved himself like a--fool; he had far more wit than our
deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
regarded as high-treason.
His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
--If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
only to tell the world, _There are still more people coming_.--
The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins,
but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with
a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet
wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can
tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a
Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters
the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
merely a member of the joy-club.
Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love
him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love
with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is
made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres
lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
_privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the
accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_)
to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
ones go out to the world.
Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many
countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter
looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine
_stater_.
The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the
Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room,
to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and
superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
he--beheads.
When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the
index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and
serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that
rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant,
however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness
must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,"
he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want
to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--
So do I.
P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
on.