ROSA VON MEYERN--TONE-ECHOES AND AFTER BREEZES FROM THE LOVELIEST
OF ALL NIGHTS--LETTERS OF NATHALIE AND FIRMIAN--TABLE-TALK BY
LEIBGEBER.
If on some dewy, warm and starry night of spring the miners in some
salt mine were to have their great penthouse-roof of earth lifted away
from over their heads, and find themselves thus, of a sudden, brought
out from their confined, candle-lit cellar into the wide, dim,
sleeping-hall of nature--out of their subterranean stillness in among
the breezes, the perfumes, the whisperings of the spring--these miners
would be exactly in Firmian's case, whose heretofore prisoned, silent,
and serene soul the night just past had driven out of its prison with
might, darkening it with new sorrows and joys, and a whole new world.
Heinrich maintained a most speaking silence concerning the night in
question, and, on the other hand, Firmian betrayed a mute hunting after
speech. Strive as he might to fold those wings of his (which had been
stretched all moist from under their wing-covers on that foregoing
night for a first time), they _would not_ fold quite short enough to go
back under them again. Matters got to feel very oppressive and sultry
for Leibgeber after a time. On that previous night they had come back
in perfect silence to Bayreuth and to bed, and he wearied at the
thought of all the demi-shades and demi-tints which would have to be
got ready on the palette before so much as four bold touches could be
given to the picture of the night.
Perhaps there is nothing more regrettable than that we do not all have
the hooping-cough at one and the same time--or are not all suffering
the sorrows of Werther--or are not all twenty-one, or sixty-one--or
have not all hypochondria--or are not all spending our honeymoons--or
indulging in games of banter. How charming it would be (were we all
choristers singing in the same coughing-tutti) to find everybody else
in just the same condition as ourselves--and put up with them
therefore, and forgive in them that in which they were just like _us_!
But as things really are--now when the one coughs to-day, and the other
not till to-morrow (the simultaneous company-coughing in church always
excepted); when one has to be taking dancing-lessons while another is
saying his prayers in the conventicle; when one father's daughter is
being held up at the font while the other's son is being lowered into
his little grave;--_now_, when destiny is always striking on the hearts
about us chords quite unrelated to the key of our own, or, at any rate,
superfluous sixths, major sevenths, minor seconds;--now, as things are,
in this universal lack of unison and harmony, what can be expected but
a screeching cat-charivari--and, if we can't have a little melody, we
must be content with a little _arpeggio-ing_ up and down.
By way of a fever for conversation, or pump-handle wherewith to force a
drop or two up from the heart, Leibgeber caught hold of Firmian's hand,
and embraced it softly and warmly with all his fingers. He put one or
two unimportant questions concerning what walks and expeditions they
should think of for the day. But he had not foreseen that this
hand-clasp would be the means of landing him in deeper difficulties of
embarrassment,--for he found that it was now incumbent on him to keep a
control on his _hand_ as well as on his tongue--and he couldn't let
Firmian's hand drop all in a moment, like a hot potato, but found it
necessary to let it out of his clasp by a gradual _diminuendo_. This
species of careful watch over his feelings was a process which made
Leibgeber blush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, indeed,
he would have thrown even this description of mine of it into the fire.
I am given to understand that he never could bring himself to utter the
word "heart" even to women--who always have their _heart_ (namely the
word) on their tongues, like a kind of _globus hystericus_. He said,
"It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts,--the button on their
fanfoil; and, to _me_, it is a poison _bolus_, a pitch-ball for the Bel
of Babel."
So his hand escaped, on a sudden, from its close arrest; he seized his
hat and stick, and cried: "I see you are just as great a goose as I am
myself: _instanter_, _instantius_, _instantissime_, in three words, did
you talk to her about the Widows' Fund? Yes or no--not another
syllable. I go Out at that door this instant!" Siebenkæs brought out
all his items of news on this subject as rapidly as possible, so as to
be quit of each and all of them for ever. "She is certain to agree to
it. I said nothing to her about it. I _can_ NOT. But _you_ can quite
easily. And you must. I am going no more to Fantasie. And we shall have
a grand time of it this afternoon, Heinrich! The music of our lives
shall be of a sounding sort. The pedals of the joy-notes are all ready
on our harps to be pressed down; and we'll press them!" Heinrich,
partly recovering his equanimity, said, as he went out, "The Cremona
strings of the human instrument are made of living membrane, the breast
is only the sounding board--and the head is the damper."
Solitude lay around our friend like some beautiful country--all the
echoes, driven away from him, and wandering, lost and astray, could
find their way back to him now athwart it. And on the crape-veil, woven
of the twelve past hours, which had laid itself over his life's
loveliest historical picture, he could tremblingly trace that
picture's lines with crayon-pencil, and trace, and trace them over
again, a thousand and a thousand times! But a visit to the beautiful
Fantasie--blooming richer and fairer as the hours went by--this he must
deny himself; for he must not be a _living_ hedge, to fence and bar
Nathalie from that Valley of Blossom. He must pay for bliss with
privation. The charms of the town and neighbourhood had still their
bright, many-tinted skins--but their sweet kernels were gone.
Everything was to him as some dessert dish which had, in the older
time, had coloured sugar sprinkled over it, which was now, somehow,
turned to coloured sand. All his hopes--all the flowers and fruit of
his life (as is the case with our higher ones)--now grew and matured
beneath the ground, like those of the subterranean vetch;[78] I mean,
in the sham grave into which he was going. How little he had--and yet,
how much! His feet were upon prickly rose branches, and all round the
Elysian fields of his future he saw thorny bushes, bristly undergrowth,
and a wall built, beginning at his grave. His Leipzig rose valley was
dwindled into the one green rosebud-twig, which had been transplanted,
unblown, from Nathalie's heart to his. And yet, how much he _had_. A
forget-me-not, from Nathalie, for all his life to come (the silken ones
she gave him were but the hulls of that whose blossom was immortal and
eternal); a springtime in his soul at last, at last after all these
many springs--to be _so_ beloved, for the first time by a woman as an
hundred dreams and poets had pictured to him that men _might_ be
beloved. To pass, in an instant, at a single step, from his dingy
lumber room of old law papers and books into the fresh, green, flowery,
golden age of love,--for the first time, not only to gain a rare and
priceless love like this, but to take away with him _such_ a parting
kiss, like a sun into all his coming life, to light and warm it through
and through for ever! _This_ was bliss for one who had had his cross to
bear in former days. But, more than this, he was free to let himself be
borne along upon the beauteous waves of this river of Eden without care
or constraint, inasmuch as Nathalie never could be his, nor should he
ever see her more. In Lenette he had loved no Nathalie as in the latter
no Lenette. His wedded love was a prosaic summer day of sultry
hay-making, but _this_ was a poetic spring night of starlight and
flowers, and his new world was like the name of the spot where it was
created--Fantaisie. He did not deceive himself as to the fact that, as
he was going to die before Nathalie, he was loving, in her, merely a
departed spirit, and that _as_ a departed spirit--nay, while yet in
this life, of a truth, for _him_, a pure and glorified risen soul; and
he freely put the question to himself whether there were any reason why
he should not love this Nathalie (thus departed into the past, for
_him_) as truly and fondly as any other, departed long since into a yet
remoter past--the Heloise of an Abelard or St. Preux, or a poet's
Laura, or a Werther's Lotte for whom his dying was not even to be as
real as Werther's.
With all his efforts, he could not manage to say more to Leibgeber
than, "She must have been very, very fond of _you_, this rare,
exceptional soul--for it is only to my resemblance to you that I can
ascribe her heavenly kindness to _me_--who am so little like other
men--and have never been cared for by women." Leibgeber--and he himself
as soon as he said it--laughed at this almost idiotic statement; but
what is any and every lover, during his May month, but a dear, genuine,
simple sheep?
Leibgeber soon came back to the hotel with the news that he had seen
the English lady on her way to Fantaisie. Firmian was very glad of it.
She rendered his resolve to shut himself out of the entire circle of
delight easier to execute. For she was the Count von Vaduz's daughter,
and consequently must not see him (Siebenkæs) at present, having to
believe him hereafter to be Leibgeber. Heinrich botanised, however, the
whole day on the flowery slope of Fantaisie, with the view of
discovering and observing the flower _goddess_, rather than the
flowers, with his botanical glasses (to wit, his eyes). But no goddess
appeared. Alas! our poor wounded Nathalie had _so many_ reasons for
keeping aloof from the ruins of her loveliest hours--for fleeing the
scene of conflagration (now overgrown with flowers) where she might
encounter him whom she meant to meet no more.
A few days after this, the Venner Rosa von Meyern honoured the company
at the _table d'hôte_ in the 'Sun' with _his_.... If the author's
calculations as to dates do not wholly mislead him, he was at
dinner there on that occasion himself. But I have only an indistinct
recollection of the two advocates, and none at all of the
Venner--because coxcombs of his description are an uninteresting
species of animals, and there are whole game-preserves and zoological
gardens full of them to be met with at all times. I have more than once
met with characters, in the body, whom I have subsequently taken
careful wax casts of from the crowns of their heads to the soles of
their boots, and then exhibited them about the country in my collection
of wax-work figures. But I wish I always knew beforehand exactly
_which_ of the people whom I happen to be dining or travelling with
chances to be the one who is going to have his portrait painted in this
way. I should note down, and store up a thousand trifling, minute
peculiarities, and lay them down in my epistolary cellars. As it is, I
sometimes find myself obliged (and I confess it freely) to set to work
and _coolly lie_ a number of matters of minor importance--for instance,
that a thing takes place about six o'clock, or about seven--if I happen
to be wholly without documentary evidence on the point. Wherefore it is
a moral certainty that if three other authors had sat down, on the same
morning with me, to give the world an account of Siebenkæs's wedded
life derived from the same historical sources as mine, that we four,
however great our devotion to truth, would have produced family
histories containing much the same amount and description of inaccuracy
as we find in those which the four Evangelists have given us; so that
our tetrachord would have stood in need of a good tuning with a
tuning-pipe in the shape of a "Harmony" of our Gospels.
Meyern dined at the 'Sun,' as we have said. He told Siebenkæs with a
triumph, which was not without a dash of menace, that he was going back
to Kuhschnappel next day. He was vainer than ever--probably he had
offered his hand to some fifty of the fair sex of Bayreuth, as though
he had been the giant Briareus, with fifty wedding-rings on his hundred
hands. He was as greedy of the fair sex as cats are of _marum verum_;
which is why both are surrounded with _metallic_ guards by their
possessors. When the clergy rivet poachers of this description,
alive, to one particular animal of their chase by means of a strong
wedding-ring, and the animal of the chase in question drags them
through every thicket till they are scratched and bled to death,
philanthropic weekly-papers would say that it is too severe a
punishment; and it is so, no doubt, for the poor animal of the chase.
On the following day Rosa really did send to ask whether Siebenkæs had
any message to send to his wife, as he was going back to see her.
Nathalie was invisible still. All that Firmian saw of her was a letter
for her which he saw shaken out of the post-bag when he went (as he did
every day) to see if there was one from his wife. Lenette did not
require more hours to write a letter than Isocrates did years for a
panegyric on the Athenians--no more, but just the same number, namely
about ten. Judging by the handwriting and the seal, the letter for
Nathalie was from the (step) father of his country, Herr von Blaise.
"Thou darling girl," thought Firmian, "with what deliberation he will
pass the burning focus of his burning-glass (formed of the ice of his
heart) over every wound of thy soul! How many secret tears wilt thou
weep--and no one to count them; and thou hast no hand now to dry them
and hide them, except thine own!"
One exquisite, blue afternoon he went alone to the only pleasure garden
which was not barred against him--the Hermitage. Memories met him every
where--all painfully sweet memories. At every spot he had lost, or
renounced, something of life or heart--had become a hermit, in
accordance with the place's name. Could he forget the great, dim glade
where, beside his kneeling friend, and before the setting sun, he had
sworn to die, and part from his wife and from all the world he knew?
He left the joy-place, turned his face to the setting sun (which almost
hid, in its brightness, the prospect from his sight), and strolled in
circles round the town. With a deeply moved heart he gazed after the
gently radiant luminary as it sank, amid the glowing cloud-embers,
towards that distant spot where his widowed Lenette would be standing
in her silent room, with her face lighted up by the evening red. "Ah!
dear, good Lenette," the voice within him cried, "why can I not press
thee to this full, tender heart, here in this paradise, in bliss? I
should love thee better here, and forgive thee easier."
Yes, of a truth, it is thou, kind Nature--never ending Love, who
changest, in us, distance of body into nearness of soul. It is thou
who, when we are utterly happy in some distant spot, bringest to us
from afar, in fancy, the beloved forms of those whom we have had to
leave--they come like beautiful music, or like happy years--and we
stretch out our arms to the clouds that go soaring over the hills
beyond which lie the dwellings of those whom we love the best. Our
severed hearts open to those distant ones as the flowers which open to
the sun unfold their petals even on days when there are clouds between
them.
The splendour died away, leaving the blood-like track of the sunken sun
in the blue; the earth with her gardens seemed to stand out brighter
and clearer. Then suddenly Firmian came on the green Tempè Vale of
Fantaisie, lying before him all loveliness of sight and of sound,
tinted with the red of the evening clouds and with the white of
blossoming boughs. But over it stood an angel with a gleaming cloud
streak for sword, saying, "Here enter thou not! Knowest thou not the
Eden from whence thou hast gone out?"
Firmian turned him about, and there, in the gloaming of spring, leaned
upon the wall of the first of the Bayreuth houses he reached on his
homeward way; so that the wounds of his eyes might have a chance to
grow whole--that he might not meet his friend bearing scars which would
have to be "explained." Leibgeber was not in, however, but there was
something there of a very unexpected kind--a letter from Nathalie to
him.
Ye who have keenly felt--or deeply regretted--that there is a
Moses-veil, an altar-railing, a prison-grating, made both of body
and earth--stretched out for ever and aye, between one soul and
another--_ye_ cannot well blame this poor, deep-touched, solitary
FRIEND, that he took up the cold paper unseen, and pressed it to his
burning lips, and to his trembling heart. For of a truth, every
_body_--even the human body, is, from the soul's point of view,
merely the sacred _reliquiæ_ of an invisible spirit; and not only the
letter, which you kiss, but the hand which wrote it, too, is, like the
lips, whose kiss _you think_, assures you--(but it is a deceptive
assurance)--of the _closeness_ of your union, your _flowing_ or
_fusing_ into one, only the sacred outward and visible sign of a
something higher and dearer; and these deceptions differ only in their
sweetness.
Leibgeber came in, opened the letter, and read it aloud:
"To-morrow morning at five o'clock, I shall be turning my back upon
your beautiful town. I am going to Schraplau. But I cannot leave this
lovely valley, oh dear friend, without once again giving you the
assurance of my unchanging friendship, and conveying to you my thanks
and wishes for yours. I should so have liked to say good-bye to you in
a more living manner; but my long leave-taking from my English friend
is not yet over, and I have now _her_ wishes to combat (as I had my
_own_ before) before I can bury myself in, or rather, wing my flight to
my village solitude. This beautiful spring has sorely wounded me, and
that with joys as well as with sorrows. But (if I may go so far afield
for a comparison), my heart, like Cranmer's, is left for those I love,
unconsumed amid the ashes of my funereal pyre. May all go well! well!
with you--better than can ever be the case with me, a woman. Fate
cannot take much from you, nay, nor give you much either. There are
smiling eternal rainbows playing around _all_ the waterfalls for you;
but the rain-clouds of a woman's heart must drop for many a long day ere
they are brightened by the sad, yet cheering tints of the Iris which
memory casts upon them at length. _Your_ friend is with you still, no
doubt. Press him warmly to your heart, and tell him, all that _yours_
wishes, and _gives_ him, mine _wishes_ him; and never will he, or you,
whom he loves, be forgotten by me. Always
"Your NATHALIE."
During the reading of this, Firmian stood with his face pressed to the
window, and lifted towards the evening sky. Heinrich, with a true
friend's delicacy of perception, took the answer out of his lips, and
said, looking to him, "Yes, this Nathalie is good and kind, in very
truth, and a thousand times better than thousands of other people are;
but I will let myself be driven over by her carriage, and crushed
beneath the wheels of it, if I don't wait for her at four o'clock in
the morning, get into the carriage, and sit down beside her. Ay,
verily! I will get her to lend me both her ears, and I will fill them
full--or my own are longer than any elephant's, though he _does_ use
his for fly-flappers."
"Yes, do, dear Henry," said Firmian, in the most cheerful tones he
could force from his oppressed throat. "I shall give you three lines to
take in your hand, just that you may have something to give her, since
I am never to see her again."
There is a certain lyric intoxication of heart, during which people
never ought to write letters, because, in the course of fifty years or
so they may, perhaps fall into the hands of people who are without
either the heart or the intoxication. However, Firmian wrote, and did
not seal; and Leibgeber did not read.
"_I_ bid you farewell, too! But _I_ cannot say 'Don't forget me.' Ah!
forget me! But leave me the forget-me-not which you gave me--to keep
for evermore. Though Heaven is past and over, death has yet to come.
And mine is now very near, and it is for this reason alone that I, and
my dear Leibgeber even more urgently, have a favour to beg of you; but
such a _strange_ favour. Nathalie, do not refuse. Your soul's sphere is
far, far above that of the feminine souls which are shocked and
frightened at everything out of the commonplace track. _You_ can dare,
and can venture, nor need you fear to risk that great heart of yours
(and happiness) on any cast. And now, as I spoke to you on _that_
night, for the last time, this is the last time I shall write to you.
"But Eternity remains for thee and me!
"F. S."
His sleep was nothing but dreams all night, that he might be sure to
awaken Leibgeber in the morning. But as early as three o'clock, the
latter, in his capacity of letter-carrier, and _Maître des Requêtes_,
was posted under a great linden-tree, whose hanging beds, thronged with
a sleeping world of inhabitants, overhung the alley by which Nathalie
was to come. Firmian, in bed, enacted Henry's part along with him, in
fancy, thinking to himself, "Now she is bidding the English lady
good-bye; now she is getting into the carriage; now she is passing the
tree, and he is taking her horses by the bridle." He phantasised
himself into dreams which stabbed his heart with pictures of her
repeated refusals of his petition. What a quantity of dark and cloudy
weather is born of one single, bright, starry night, in the physical
world as well as in the moral. At last he dreamed that she stretched
her hand to him, from her carriage, with tears in her eyes, and the
green rose-twig on her breast, and said, in low sweet tones, "I _must_
say no! Could _I_ live long, if _you_ were dead?" She pressed his hand
so warmly that he awoke. The pressure was there, and lasted, and before
him was the beaming daylight, and his beaming friend, who said, "She
has agreed, while you've been snoring here."
He had been within a hair's breadth of missing her. She had not taken
so much time to dress and depart as others do to _un_dress and arrive.
A rose-branch, wet with dew, whose leaves pricked sharper than its
thorns, was on her heart, and the long parting had tinted her lids with
red. She was delighted to see him, though a little frightened, and
anxious to hear. He gave her Firmian's open letter, to begin with, by
way of credential. Her eager eyes shone out once more through two
tear-drops, and she asked, "What am I to do?" "Nothing," said
Leibgeber, in an artful manner, half jest, half earnest, "except allow
the Prussian Treasury to remind you of his death twice a-year, as if
you were his widow." She answered, "No!" pronouncedly, on one note,
behind which, however, there was only a comma, not a full stop. He once
more went through his petitions, and his reasons, adding, "Do it, at
least, for _my_ sake, if for no other reason. I can't bear to see him
baulked of a wish, or disappointed in a hope. He is a bear whom that
bear-leader, the State, keeps dancing all the winter, without a wink of
winter sleep, whereas _I_ seldom take my paw out of my mouth, but suck
away continually. He kept awake all last night, so as to make sure of
calling me in time, and he is counting the moments anxiously at home
now." She read the letter again, syllable by syllable. He did not ask
for a final answer, but spun out a talk on other subjects--the morning,
her journey, the village of Schraplau. The morning had already raised
her pillar of fire beyond Bayreuth, the town kept adding pillars of
smoke; in a few minutes he must out of the carriage and back. "And so,
fare you well," he said, in the softest of tones, with one foot on the
carriage-step; "may your future grow brighter and brighter, like the
day about us. And now, _what_ last word am I to carry to my _good_,
_dear_ beloved Firmian?" (I shall make a remark in a minute or two.)
She lowered her travelling-veil like the drop curtain of a drama which
is done, and said in low and stifled accents, "If I must, I must; so
let _this_ be, also. But you are giving me _another_ great sorrow to
take with me on my way." Here he jumped down, and the carriage, bearing
this poor soul--poor now in so many ways--rolled on with her over the
shattered ruins of her youthful life.
If he had got a "No" instead of this hard wrung-out "Yes," he would
have caught her again on the other side of the town, and been her
fellow-traveller for another fragment of her journey.
I said above, that I should "make a remark;" it is this: that the
friendship or love which a woman has for a man is fed by that which she
sees existing between him and his friends, and grows visibly in
consequence--converting it, polyp-fashion, into its own substance. It
was for this reason that Leibgeber, by instinct, had given such warm
expression to _his_. In the case of us, masculine lovers, again, this
sort of electric coating, or magnetic armature of our love with the
friendship of our beloved object with other women is most uncommon.
What pleases _us_, is to see her shrinking from everybody else, growing
hard and frozen to them on our account, handing _them_ nothing but ices
and cold pudding, but serving us with glowing goblets of love. This
process of making the heart, like wine, more fiery and strong,
and generous, by freezing it at the boiling-point, may please a
short-sighted selfish soul; but never a clear-seeing, kindly, loving
one. At all events, the author declares that, whenever _he_ has caught
a glimpse--in a mirror or in water--of the reverse side of the
Janus-head, of which the other side has been smiling in love upon him,
frowning in dislike upon the rest of the world, he has made a face or
two of the same disliking sort on the spot--at the Janus-head. For the
mere contrast's sake, a girl should never slander, find fault, or
dislike, at all events, while she is a lover; when she is a married
woman, the mistress of a house, and has children, and cows, and
servants, of course no reasonable man or husband, can possibly object
to a moderate amount of bad temper, and a little scolding now and then.
Nathalie had acceded to the strange proposal for many reasons; just
because it _was_ a strange one; and then the word "widow" would, to her
romantic heart, be constantly weaving a mourning-band of sorrow,
binding her and Firmian together, and winding in charming and fanciful
wreaths round the events, and the vows, of the night of their good-bye.
Besides, to-day, she had been gradually ascending from one emotion to
another, and had reached a height where her head began to reel.
Moreover, she was boundlessly unselfish, and consequently never
troubled herself to think whether a thing had the _appearance_ of
selfishness or not. And, lastly, she cared less about appearances in
general, and the conclusions people drew from them than, perhaps, a
young lady _should_ care.
Leibgeber, now that all his goals were reached, emitted a long,
gladsome zodiacal light; and Firmian did not darken it with the full
depth of his mourning night shadow, but only with the half-tints
thereof. At the same time, he felt he could not visit either of
Bayreuth's pleasure-places, Eremitage or Fantaisie, which were
Herculaneum and Portici to him now. Yet he _must_ pass by the latter on
his homeward way, and disinter many things that were buried. He did not
care to delay his return much longer; not only was the moon set now,
which had shed a new silvery radiance upon all the white flowers and
blossoms of the spring, but Leibgeber, besides, was a death's head
_memento mori_, always saying, in the most unmistakable manner--though
with neither lips nor tongue--"It must be borne in mind that thou hast
got to die, in Kuhschnappel, in jest." Leibgeber's heart burned for the
world without, the flames of his forest-conflagration were eager to
dart and play uncontrolled over alps, islands, capital cities; the
Vaduz water reservoir of acts of parliament--paper _lit-de-parade_ and
_lit-de-justice_--would have been to _him_ a heavy, suffocating,
feather-bed, such as people in a hopeless state of hydrophobia used to
be smothered by out of compassion. In fact, a small town could as
little endure him as he could endure a small town. Indeed, even in
Bayreuth--a larger place--there were sundry _Commissaires de Justice_
at the _table d'hôte_ at the 'Sun' Hotel, who told me with their own
lips, that when Leibgeber spoke his table-speech (reported in Chapter
XII.) on the subject of Crown Princes, they thought it was a deliberate
satire on a particular Margrave then reigning; whereas all his satires
were really directed against the human race in _general_, not against
individuals. Again, how thoughtlessly he conducted himself during the
poor eight days which he spent in our good town of Hof im Voigtlande.
Are there not credible "Varisker" (as according to some authorities the
inhabitants of Voigtland were called in Cæsar's time--though others
consider "Narisker" to have been the word), who have assured me that he
bought bergamot pears in the open market-place, near the court-house,
and cakes at a baker's stall, in his best suit of Sunday clothes? And
are there not Nariskers of the fair sex, who, having observed his
proceedings thereafter, are ready to depose that, though stall-feeding
is a matter of universal enjoinment, he nevertheless ate this
food-offering in the open air like a prince, and on the march, like a
Roman army? There are witnesses, who waltzed with him, to testify that
he went to masked balls in a _robe de chambre_ and a cocked-hat and
feathers, and that he had worn both all the previous day in earnest,
before putting them on in the evening in jest. A Narisker not without
some brains, and possessing a good memory, who was not aware that I had
the fellow under my historical hands, repeated the following somewhat
audacious utterances of Leibgeber's.
"Every man is a born pedant. There are very few who are hung in chains
_after_ they are dead: but almost every one _is_ hung, in most accursed
chains, _before_ death; and, therefore, in most countries, 'Freeman'
means provost-marshal, or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be serious;
therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is wrong to jest in the
slightest degree. He held, that the spirit which brooded, creating,
over the ink of colleges was (as many Fathers of the Church held that
to be which, according to Moses, moved upon the face of the waters)
_wind_. In his eyes, worshipful councils, conferences, deputations,
sessions, processions, &c., were not, at bottom, wholly without a spice
of comic salt, looked upon as grave parodies of stiff and empty
seriousness, more especially as in general there was but one member of
the conclave (or perhaps his wife) who really voted, decided, or ruled,
the mystic _corpus_ itself, sitting at the green table, chiefly for the
joke of the thing; just as, in flute clocks, though there is a
flute-player screwed on outside whose fingers work up and down upon the
flute, which grows out of his mouth, and children are beyond themselves
with delight at the talent of the wooden imposition, every clockmaker
knows that it is _inside_ that the wheels are which act on the hidden
pipes with their pinions." I answered that these sayings showed that
Leibgeber was of a rather audacious and ironical turn of mind. It is,
perhaps, to be desired, that everybody were in a position to do what
the author does in this place, namely, beg all Nariskers to have the
goodness to point to any single word or deed of his which can be called
satirical, or not exactly adapted to fit on to the cap-block of a _pays
coutumier_. If he is not speaking the truth, he begs that he may be
contradicted without the slightest hesitation.
The winnowing-fan which blew Siebenkæs out of Bayreuth on the following
day, was a letter from the Count von Vaduz, in which he expressed his
friendly regret on account of Leibgeber's cold-fever and tallowy
appearance, at the same time begging him to hasten his entry upon the
duties of his office. This letter was to Siebenkæs as a wing-membrane
wherewith to hasten his flight to his seeming cocoon-grave, in order to
issue forth from it a young full-fledged inspector. In our next chapter
he turns him about, and quits the beautiful town. In what remains of
this, he is taking private lessons in silhouette clipping from
Leibgeber, whose _rôle_ he is to succeed to by dying. The
master-cutter, and scissorial-mentor did nothing, in this connection,
worthy of being handed down to posterity by me save one thing, as to
which I do not find a word in my documents, which was told me by Mr.
Feldmann, the keeper of the hotel, who was carving at table when it
occurred. It was only that a stranger who was dining there clipped out
a profile of Leibgeber, among others; while Leibgeber, seeing what he
was about, clipped out, under cover of the table-cloth, a silhouette of
this supernumerary copyist's _own_ head and shoulders, and when the
latter handed him his, Leibgeber returned the compliment, saying "_al
Pari_!" thus paying him in his own coin. This stranger made airs of
various kinds, as well as silhouettes, but succeeded best with the
_phlogistic_ sort, which he made with his lungs, without any difficulty
to speak of, and in which he throve and took on colour, as plants do;
this sort of air can be breathed, and is designated by the name of
"wind," to distinguish it from the other phlogistic gases which can not
be inhaled. When this phlogistic wind-maker (who gave admirable
lectures from town to town, on the other gases, from that portable
professorial chair, his body) had departed with his cutter's wages,
Heinrich contented himself with the following remarks.
"Thousands of people ought to travel and teach both at once. He who
limits himself to three days can certainly (as a species of private
tutor extraordinary) in that time read excellent lectures on every kind
of subject which he knows little or nothing about. Thus much I
see already, that there are brilliant comets--shining wandering
stars--revolving round me and others, and throwing flying lights upon
us concerning electricity, gases, magnetism, in short natural science
in general; but this is but a small matter. May this duck's wing choke
me if these rostrum carriers, and travelling professors (travelling
scholars they are not), might not lecture upon science of _every_ kind,
with great advantage, at all events, upon the minuter branches. Could
not _one_, for instance, travel and read lectures upon the first
century after Christ's birth, or the first millenary before it (which
is no longer), I mean, tell ladies and gentlemen all about it in a
lecture or two, a second undertaking the second, a third the third, an
eighteenth our own? I can quite imagine travelling medicine-chests for
the soul of this kind. But as far as I am concerned, I should by no
means stop at this point--I should advertise myself as a peripatetic
private tutor in branches of the minutest possible order; _e. g_., in
electoral courts, I should give lessons concerning the obligations to
be entered into by the nominees to government appointments; in all and
every place I should give exegetical instruction concerning the first
verse of the first book of Moses--the _kraken_, the devil (who _may_,
perhaps, be more or less the same as the other), on Hogarth's
tail-piece, in connection with Vandyke's headpieces, on coins and in
portraits; on the true distinction between the Hippocentaur, and the
Onocentaur, which is more like that between genius and German criticism
than anything else; on the first paragraph of Wolf, or even of Pütter;
on the funeral bier of Louis (XIV.) the be-grandised, and the public
rejoicings under it; on the academic licences which a passing
lecturer may allow himself to take, in addition to that of pocketing
his fee--the greatest of which is often that of shutting the
lecture-room door, (to make a long story short) on _everything_, in
fact. If we go on in this way (I can't help being struck), that
when circulating high schools have got to be as common as village
schools--when savants ply backwards and forwards like live shuttles
between the towns (and they have begun to do so already), attaching
Ariadne threads (of _talk_, at all events) everywhere, to everything,
with the view of weaving them into something or other--if we go on on
this road, I say, when each sun of a professor--on the Ptolemaic
system, moves about among the dark orbs (fixed upon necks), which
surround him, and casts his light upon each in turn (a state of things
wholly opposed to the Copernican system, according to which the sun
stands still on the professorial rostrum in the centre of the orbits of
the revolving planets or students)--if we go on (I say once more, on
this road), one may be pretty sure that the world will really come
to be something at last; a _learned_ world, at the very least and
lowest--philosophers will obtain the true philosopher's stone--gold;
what fools will obtain will be the philosophers, and knowledge of every
kind: and moreover the restorers of science will get set upon _their_
legs. All soil would then be classic soil--so that people would of
necessity have to plough, and fight on, classic soil. Every gallows
hill would be a Pindus, every prince's throne an oracle-cave of
Delphi--and I should be obliged to anyone who should show me such a
thing as a single ass in the whole of Germany, _then_. This is what
would necessarily happen if all the world were to set out upon learned,
and instructive, journeys--that portion of it being, of course,
necessarily excepted which would be obliged to stay at home if there
were to be anybody to listen and pay (like the _point de vue_, in
military 'evolutions,' for which the adjutant is generally told off)."
Here he suddenly jumped up, and cried, "I wish to Heaven I could go to
Bruckenau;[79] there, on the bath tubs, should be my professorial
chair, and seat of the Muses. The tradesman's, the country gentleman's
wife or daughter should lie, like a shell fish, in her closed basin and
relic-casquet, with nothing sticking out but her head (just as is the
case in her ordinary costume), her head which it would be my business
to instruct. What discourses, _à la_ St. Anthony of Padua, should I not
hold with these tender tench--or sirens--though they might better be
described as fortresses protected by moats, or wet ditches. I should
sit lecturing and teaching upon the wooden holsters of their glowing
charms (phosphorus-like, kept in water!) But this would be nothing
compared to the benefits I should bestow upon society were _I_ to have
_my_self cooped into an _etui_, or scabbard of the kind, and then be
net a-going like a water-organ, and, like some water-god, devote my
pedagogical talents to the edification of the class of students sitting
on my tub-lid! True, I should have to make my illustrative gestures
under the warm water, because the only part of me out of my sheath
would be my head (like the hilt of a dagger), with my master's cap on
it. But the loveliest of doctrine,--luxuriant rice-ears, and succulent
aquatic plants sprouting in the water--a play of philosophic
water-works, and so forth, should be emitted from the bath, and send
away all the beauties (whom, in fancy, I see thronging round my
quaker's and Diogenes' tub) besprinkled with learning and instruction
of the most superlative description. By Heaven! I ought to be off to
Bruckenau this instant, not so much as a watering-place guest as in the
capacity of a private tutor."