The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
from it.
Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_
(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
one.
The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is
over....
I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.
Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
paper is already two pages long....
Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said
to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that
regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it
is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which
grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.
Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same
moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and
evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends
upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal
brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this
keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels
the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian
hands or to Italian necks?
When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from
whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.
Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
_listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by
the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was
a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.
Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say
nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to
say something.
AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.
Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the
people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there
in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but
only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
_ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself
indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of
her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few
_epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a
measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_
(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or
something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
_long_ ones.
A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are
just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic
needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old
man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
_Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore,
wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis
habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for
another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.
_End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
enjoyed in Despotisms_.
The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
and more serious than the former has been.
Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but
merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.
The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German
were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....
When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou
good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...
Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
&c.
When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment
into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
court, take 4½ paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of
what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personæ_, among whom, unfortunately,
I see the apothecary Zeusel.
We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
the presence of the Regent and Patient.
No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
breast.
Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a
complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical
fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and
suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with
vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
the trouble to write--
Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and
Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where
Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
undressing.
_End of the Benefit-Comedy_.
I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once,
from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....
My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in
favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing
absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture,
with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials....
My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair,
and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd
ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."
While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who
is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my
life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose
understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of
which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will
dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in
earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed
it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one,
offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.
He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most
costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more
sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before."
Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot
surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
_shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she
requested to have brought over to her.
He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he
himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of
the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133]
"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind
up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_
lady reader think?
She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in
a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called
[Greek: kadiskon].[136]
Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of
it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it
apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon
may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander
should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
_barrière-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to
the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into
which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137]
"Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing
the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing
away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you
and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently
patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly
around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine,
ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman
even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and
_side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
composure.
At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read
them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
"Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
"Here, by this ring, you see,
Father, Son, Spirit, three,
Make one sole Deity."
The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he
could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor
was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a
present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an
Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said
he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than
on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance
of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the
Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
_threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.
Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of
such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal
years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
second-telling watches indicate and strike.
--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven
o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
sitting there.
The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal
I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda;
she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female
world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a
quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
recruiting-license.
But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?
1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days,
reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
_associée_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or
exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her
forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by
her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at
the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much
certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_,
and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_
for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several
objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious;
else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of
adopted childhood.
To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_
capital, made more rare, hold out three years.
2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that
is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love
springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will,"
he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her
heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat
heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or
pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if
one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is
_right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut
themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."
Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever
so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under
the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he
is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
Chapter....