_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly,
however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are
these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but
they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set
vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--
It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are
all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to
"Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the
Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
"Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
"With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference
compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna
authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a
separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I
seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.
The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he
cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine
Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to
love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters
are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....
In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to
have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how
Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not
energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
the cases of those that have been hung.
_End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the
Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so
gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who
bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all
caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
otherwise!--
So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
wife of the Parson:--
"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and
when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
pout the while as I will.
"E."
When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
his make to it?--
It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at
the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full
moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.