"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact,
in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
_cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I
recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on
nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of
beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way
than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I
happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the
Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
_plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and
_not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
strange.
_End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.
At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer
in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
seen all.
As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more
gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
consecrated by Nature.
He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the
house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother"
(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the
sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church
billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his
relations on the father's side?
O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery
apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be
foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence
upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the
case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.
As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is
not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood
Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher
places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
_sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
the sciences than we with the whole hand.
She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the
six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
equally--stupid.
But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty
ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
kernel in a walnut.
I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
consequence.
Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove
that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
_distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the
bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he
merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and
the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran
mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day,"
replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually
produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him
into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
garter it would be different.
Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_;
the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_
it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
paper and without engravings.
He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the
appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than
another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here
mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough
not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who
are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my
wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."
At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.