THE JOURNEY--THE CHURCHYARD--THE SPECTRE--THE END OF THE TROUBLE,
AND OF THE BOOK.
I see more clearly every day that I and the other 999,999,999 human
beings,[114] are nothing but so much skin-and-bone stuffed (like cooked
chickens), full of a mass of incongruities, contradictions,
inconsistencies, irremediable insufficiencies, and resolves, of which
every one has its antagonist muscle (_musc. antagonista_). We do not
contradict other people half as often as ourselves. This last Chapter
is a fresh proof of it. Up to this point, the reader and I have been
labouring together with the sole object of finishing this Book, and now
that we see the shore, and have all but reached it, we are both sorry
for it. I shall, at all events, be doing something--the most that I
can--if I conceal, and hide away (so to speak) the end of it, as we do
the end of a garden, and say several things which will help to lengthen
out the work a little.
The Inspector sprang out into the open country, among the corn-ears,
fortified with a muscular, full breast--the Alp of silence and
deception no longer weighed upon him as it had done. The avalanche
which had overwhelmed his life had melted to a third of its original
size Tinder the sun of his present fair fortune. His electric
Leyden-jar coating with a better income, and even the fact of his
having a great deal more to do, had charged him with fire and courage.
His appointment was a mountain permeated by so many veins of silver and
gold, that even in this first year of it he had found he was enabled to
send sundry anonymous contributions to the Prussian Widows' Fund, so as
to make amends for a good half of his fraud upon it, and see his way to
finally clearing it off altogether. I should not lay this act of duty
before the public gaze were it not that Kritter, in Göttingen--who
reckons that this fund will be exhausted in the year 1804--or even
calculators more moderate in their results, who think its extreme
unction will be received in 1825, might take occasion, from these
Flower-pieces of mine, to lay its death wholly at the Inspector's door.
If this should prove to be the case, I should very deeply regret having
alluded to the subject, in the remotest manner, in my Flower-pieces.
He did not take his way by Hof or Bayreuth, or any of the old romantic
journey-roads. He dreaded lest the hand of Fate (which sows behind the
clouds) might bring his phantom-body before Nathalie's eyes. And yet he
hoped a little that this said hand might bring him just the least bit
in contact with his Leibgeber, since _he_ had been so recently
cruising in these waters. As a matter of course, he had embodied
himself, _en route_, in the said Leibgeber's shirt, jacket, and
complete exterior--the same which he had swopped with him in the inn at
Gefrees and this costume was a mirror which continually showed him the
absent one's image. A "Saufinder," like Leibgeber's, who lifted his
head up to him in a forest-cottage, sent a throb of joy through his
heart; but the dog's nose knew him as little as did the dog's master.
And yet, the nearer he drew to the hills and woods, behind whose
Chinese churchyard-wall stood his two empty houses--his grave and his
old lodging--the tighter did Anxiety draw her drag-net about his
heart. It was not the fear of being recognised; this, by reason of his
resemblance to Leibgeber (particularly in his present dress), was an
impossibility. Nay, people would sooner have taken him for his own
wraith and Prophet Samuel than for Siebenkæs still in the body. But,
besides love and anticipation, there was a something which made him
anxious--a something which once hemmed in and oppressed myself when I
came back among the Herculanean antiquities of my own childhood. There
clasped themselves once more around my breast the iron bands and rings
which had crushed it in my childhood--a time when the little human
creature is still tremblingly helpless and comfortless in presence of
the sorrows and sufferings of life and death--when we stand between the
footstool we have cast away, the handcuffs and ankle-chains which we
have burst asunder, and the great sighing and singing tree of
philosophy which is to guide us to the free, open battle-arena and
coronation city of this earth. In every thicket round which Firmian had
wandered in his poverty-stricken, miserable winter-autumn, he saw the
cast-off skins of the snakes sticking, which in former days had twined
themselves about his feet. Remembrance (that after-winter of his hard,
cruel days) fell into this lovelier time of his life, and the
combination of these dissimilar feelings--the clasp of the old fetters,
and the breeze of freedom of the present--generated a third sensation,
which was bitter-sweet, as well as anxious and uneasy.
When it was twilight, he walked slowly and observantly through the
streets, which were strewn with scattered ears of corn. Every child he
met going home with the supper-beer, every familiar dog, and every
well-remembered cling of a bell, was full of fossil-impressions of
joy-roses and passion-flowers, the originals of which were all fallen
to dust. As he passed the house where he used to live, he heard two
stocking-looms clattering and rattling there.
He took up his quarters in the Lizard Inn, which cannot have been the
grandest hotel in the town, inasmuch as the Advocate ate his beef on a
pewter-platter, which (to judge by the marks and _stigmata_ of a
facsimile of his own knife which it bore), seemed to have once been
enrolled as a soldier of his own pawned-plate-militia regiment.
However, the inn had this advantage--that Firmian could occupy the
little room, number seven, on the third story, and there establish a
star-observatory, or mast-head crow's-nest, which commanded Stiefel's
study just opposite, at a somewhat lower elevation. But his Lenette
never came to the window. Ah! if he had seen her, he would have knelt
on the floor for sheer sorrow. Not till it was quite dark did he see
his old friend Stiefel, who came and held a printed sheet--probably a
proof of the 'German Programme Advertiser'--against the red western
sky, it being too dark to see it inside. He was surprised to see the
Schulrath look so worn and bowed--and he had a crape on his arm too.
"Can my Lenette's poor baby be dead?" he thought.
When it was quite late he crept, all trembling, to that garden, whence
we do not all return, and which is bounded by the hanging Eden-Garden
of the second life. In the churchyard he was safe from the approach of
spectators, thanks to the ghost-stories by means of which Leibgeber had
forced his inheritance out of his guardian's clutches. On his way to
his own vacant, subterranean bed, he passed by the grave on which
(while it was black, it was grass-grown now) he had placed the
flower-garland which he had _meant_ to give Lenette a pleasant surprise
with, though it _did_ only cause her an unexpected sorrow. At last he
came to the bed-curtains of that grave-siesta, his own tombstone, and
he read the inscription with a cold shudder. "Suppose this stone
trap-door were lying upon your face," he said to himself, "building you
in from the wide heavens!"--and he thought what clouds, what coldness,
and night, reign around the two poles of life, as about the poles of
our earth--about the beginning and the end of man. He considered it a
very wicked thing to have aped the last hour--the crape-streamer of a
long, dark cloud was over the moon, his heart was tender and anxious;
when suddenly a something with colour in it, near his grave, seized his
attention, and caused a revulsion in his soul.
For there, close beside it, was a fresh grave, quite recently covered
in, surrounded by a painted wooden-frame, not unlike a bedstead. And
upon these painted boards Firmian (as long as his streaming eyes
allowed him) read what follows:--
"Here reposes in God, Wendeline Lenette Stiefel, born Engelkraut of
Augspurg. Her first husband was the lamented Poor's Advocate, F. St.
Siebenkæs. On the 20th of October, 1786, she entered, for the second
time, into holy matrimony with the Schulrath Stiefel, of this place,
and after three-quarters of a year of a peaceful union with him, she
fell asleep in childbed, on the 22nd of July, 1787, and lies here, with
her little still-born daughter, awaiting a joyful resurrection."
"Oh! poor creature, poor creature!" More he could not _think_. Now--now
that her day of life was better and warmer, the earth must swallow her,
and she take nothing with her but a hand roughened by labour, a face
furrowed with the death-bed sickness, and a contented, but empty heart,
which, hemmed down among the hollow-ways and mine-shafts of this world,
had seen scarcely any stars or flowery meadows. Her troubles had
gradually clouded over her life so thickly and darkly, that no
picturing fancy could brighten and purify them by the colour-play of
poesy, just as no rainbow is possible when the whole sky is black with
rain. "Why did I vex you so often, and pain you, even by my death, and
be so unforgiving to all your little innocent crotchets?" he said,
weeping bitterly. An earth-worm came twining out of the grave, and he
threw it forcibly away, as though it had come straight from the beloved
cold heart; although that which satiates this creature is what satiates
_us_ also at last--EARTH. He thought of the child (mouldering to dust)
which laid its thin, withered arms about his soul, as if it had been
his own, and to which Death had given as much as a God gave to
Endymion--sleep, eternal youth, and immortality. At length he tottered
away from this place of mourning with his heart wearied, not lightened,
by his tears.
When he went back to the inn, a woman with a harp was singing in the
public room (a boy accompanying her on a flute) a song, of which the
_ritournelle_ was, "dead is dead, and gone is gone." It was the same
woman who had been playing and singing on the New Year's eve when his
Lenette, now departed and at peace, had buried her face in the
handkerchief, weeping and desolate. Oh! the burning arrows of these
music-tones went hissing through his heart--the poor soul had no
shield. "I tortured her terribly in these days" (he went on constantly
saying). "_How_ she sighed! _How_ she kept silence! Ah! if you could
but see me now from on high, now that you are happier! If you could but
behold this bleeding soul of mine--not that you should forgive me, no,
only that I might have the consolation of suffering something for your
sake! Oh! how different would I be to you _now_!"
And this is what we all say when we bury some one whom we have
tortured; but on that very same evening of mourning we go and dart the
javelin deep into some other breast which is still warm. Oh! weaklings
that we are, strong only in resolves! If that form, now resolved into
its elements, whose mouldering wounds (which we ourselves inflicted) we
expiate with tears of penitence and warm resolves to do better, were to
come back to us to-day, new-created, and in the brightest bloom of
youth, it would be but for the first week that we should clasp the
newfound soul, more fondly loved than ever, to our hearts; and then we
should apply the old martyrdom instruments to it again, just as of old.
That we should do this, even to our beloved dead, I deduce from the
fact (to say nothing of our rude unkindness to the living) that, in our
dreams, when those whom we have lost revisit us again, we act over
again everything which we now repent. I do not say this to deprive any
mourner of the consolation of repentance, or of the thought, that his
love for the lost one is purer and fonder than before, but to lessen
the pride which may be grounded upon the repentance and the data of
feelings.
Later in the night, when Firmian saw the face (gnawed and sunken with
sorrow) of his old friend (who had now so little left to him), looking
up to heaven, as if seeking there among the stars his friend of whom he
was bereaved, sorrow pressed the last tear from his anguished heart,
and in the madness of grief he cast the blame upon himself of his
friend's sorrow; jut as if the latter had not a great deal to thank him
for in the first instance, before setting about pardoning him.
He awoke in all the exhaustion of sorrow, i.e. in that _bled-away_
condition of the feelings which at last resolves itself into a sweet
melting-away and longing for death. For he had lost everything--even
what was _not_ buried. He dared not go to the Schulrath for fear of
being recognised, or, at the very lowest, staking upon a most dangerous
chance the peace of mind of that most innocent creature, who would
never be able to reconcile it to either his conscience or his sense of
honour, that he had married a woman whose husband was still alive.
But he could go and see Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, with, less danger
of discovering himself, and could carry away from him a great dowry of
news. Moreover, the sickle of Death had cut through all his _other_
chains and knots, together with his bonds of love. He would be doing no
injury to any one but himself if he took off his mask of death, and
showed himself unmouldered to other people, nay, even to the sorrowing
Nathalie; particularly as on very beautiful evenings, and whenever he
did any good action, his conscience claimed the arrear-interest of the
unpaid debt of truth, refusing to grant any further letters of respite.
Also his soul swore, as a God swears to his own self, that he would
only stay there this one day, and then never come back.
The Friseur knew in a moment, from the lameness, that he could be
nobody but the Vaduz Inspector, Leibgeber. Like posterity, he decked
his own lodger, Siebenkæs, with the richest of rosemary-garlands, and
declared that these ragamuffins of stocking-weavers whom he had got
upstairs now were not to be spoken of in the same day with poor
lamented Mr. Siebenkæs. The whole house creaked when they rattled and
stamped in their upstairs-room. He then called attention to the
circumstance that the departed had taken his wife away to him within
the space of a year and day; and dwelt on the fact that she had never
forgotten the Meerbitzer's house, but had often looked in of an evening
in her widow's weeds (which she had been buried in according to her
desire), and spoken with them about all her various vicissitudes, and
about her new life. "They lived together just like two children," the
hairdresser said, "Stiefel and she." This conversation, the house, and
his old rooms, so noisy now, were all so many waste places of his
ruined Jerusalem. A stocking-loom now stood where his writing-table
used to be, and so on. All his questions about the past were so
many conflagration-relics, collected for the fresh building of his
burnt-down pleasure-chateaux from out their Phœnix ashes. Hope is
the morning Aurora of joy, and memory its red evening sky; but the
latter is terribly apt to drop down in grey dew or rain, with no colour
left in it. The blue day, which the red sky gives promise of, _does_,
indeed, break in brightness; but it is in another world, where there is
another sun. Meerbitzer unknowingly cleft, deep and wide, the split
into which he grafted the sundered flower-twigs of the bygone days on
to Firmian's heart; and when, finally, his wife related how, when
Lenette had taken the Communion of the Sick, she said to the evening
preacher, "I _shall_ go to my Firmian when I am dead, shall I not?"
Firmian averted his breast from this blind dagger-thrust, and hurried
out into the open air, that he might not encounter any one to whom he
should be constrained to lie.
Yet he could not but long for some human creature, even were one to be
found nowhere else but beneath his lowliest roof of all--in the
churchyard. The electrically-charged atmosphere of the evening brooded
and hatched melancholy longings of every kind; the sky was overspread
with scattered unripe fragments of a thunder-cloud, and in the west
horizon a muttering storm had begun, scattering its lighted pitch-rings
and full-charged clouds down upon unknown lands. He went home; but as
he passed by the tall railings of Blaise's garden, he fancied he saw a
figure like Nathalie, dressed in black, glide into the arbour. And
then, for the first time, he turned his mind to something which
Meerbitzer had said about a lady in mourning, who had come a few days
before, and wished to be shown all over the house, lingering
particularly in Siebenkæs's old rooms, and making a great many
inquiries. That she should have come out of her road on her way to
Vaduz was by no means unlikely; indeed, it was very consistent with her
romantic turn of mind, particularly as she had never seen Siebenkæs's
former home, and the Inspector had not answered her letter--as Rosa
was married, and Blaise reconciled to her (since he had seen the
ghost)--and the month of Firmian's death would naturally suggest to her
a visit to his last resting-place.
So that her friend could not but dwell all this evening with feelings
of painful fondness upon her memory--the one unclouded star which
beamed on him from the overcast heaven of his bygone days. It was deep
in the gloaming now, a cooler air was stirring. A storm had spent its
force in other regions, and there remained only some broken, lurid
clouds, piled in the sky like glowing, half-burned firebrands. He
betook himself, for a last time, to the place where death had planted
the red carnation, with its little buds snapped so untimely from its
stem. But within his soul, as without him, the air breathed less
sultrily now, and fresher; tears had blunted the sharp edge of the
first bitterness of his sorrow. He felt, with far more of gentleness,
that the earth is only our CARPENTER'S YARD, not our BUILDING-GROUND.
In the East, where the stars were rising, a long blue streak shone
above the sunken thunder-clouds. The moon (light-magnet of the sky) was
lying, like a fount of light, upon the foil of a cleft cloud, and the
wide vaporous veil was melting motionlessly away.
When Firmian, approaching the beloved grave, raised up his downcast
head, he saw a dark form resting there. He stopped short, and gazed
more piercingly. The form was a woman's. Her face, frozen into the ice
of death, was fixed on him. As he drew nearer, he saw his dearest
Nathalie leaning overpowered against the painted railing of the grave.
The autumnal breath of death had tinted her lips and cheeks with white;
her wide eyes were sightless, and nothing but the tear-drops which hung
on her lashes gave proof that she was in life, and had taken him for
the apparition of which she had heard so much. In the excess of her
romantic sorrow at his grave she had longed, in the strength and
loneliness of her heart, that his spirit might appear to her; and when
she saw him approaching, she thought Heaven had granted her prayer. And
then the iron hand of chill terror turned this red rose to a white one.
But ah, her friend was the more wretched of the two. His tender,
unshielded heart was crushed motionless between the impact of two
worlds which rushed crashing together. In tones of utter distress he
cried out, "Nathalie! Nathalie!" Her lips quivered spasmodically, and a
breath of life gave back a shade of brightness to her glance; but the
spirit was still there before her, and she closed her eyes again, and
said, with a shudder, "Oh God!" It was in vain that his voice called
her back to life; when she looked up at the apparition her heart failed
her again, and she could only cry "Oh God!" Firmian seizing her hand,
cried, "Angel of heaven, I am not dead! only look at me! Nathalie,
don't you know me? Oh! merciful God, don't punish me so terribly, don't
let me be the cause of her death!" At length she slowly lifted her
heavy eyelids, and saw her old friend trembling beside her, with tears
of anxiety and terror. His tears were happier, but more abundant, and
he smiled sorrowfully upon her as she still kept her eyes open, and
said, "Nathalie, I am still upon this earth, in very truth, and suffer
as you do yourself; don't you see how I tremble on your account? Take
my warm, living hand. Are you still afraid?" "No," she answered
faintly; but she still looked at him in an awe-stricken fashion, as at
a super-earthly being, and had not courage to ask for an explanation of
the riddle. He helped her to rise (gently weeping), and said, "But,
dear innocent one, come away from this place of sorrow, where so many
tears have been shed already. For _your_ heart mine has no secrets now.
Ah! I can tell _you_ everything, and I _will_ tell you everything." He
led her out, above the quiet dead, through the back gate of the
churchyard. She leaned on his arm heavily and languidly, shuddering
again often as they climbed the little height, and only the tears which
joy, relief from terror, grief, and exhaustion combined, had brought to
her eyes, fell like warm balsam upon her chilled and wounded heart.
When they reached the top of the height she sat down to rest, and the
black night-woods, railed round by white harvests, and cut across by
the moon's silent sea of light, lay before them. Nature had drawn out
the "pianissimo lute" organ-stop of midnight, and by Nathalie's side
stood one of her beloved dead, new-risen from the grave. He told her
now all about Leibgeber's entreaties; the short story of his mock-death;
his residence with the Count; all the longings and tears of his long
solitude; his firm determination rather to fly from her than to deceive
or wound her beloved heart, either by speech or in writing; and the
disclosures he had made to her friend's father. She sobbed at the
account of his last moments and parting from Lenette, as if it had all
been real. She thought on many things as she merely said, "Ah! it was
only for other people's happiness that you sacrificed yourself. But
you will be able to have done with all this deception _now_, and to
make amends for it, will you not?" "I shall," he said, "to the very
utmost of my power; and my heart and my conscience shall be free and
clear once more. Have I not even kept the vow I made to _you_--that
I should not see you again till after my death?" She smiled gently.
They both sunk into a dreamy and blissful silence. At last, seeing her
lay a mourning-cloak butterfly[115] (disabled by the night-dew) down
upon her lap, the fact that she was in mourning herself struck him for
the first time, and he hastily asked, "_You_ are not in mourning for
any one, are you?" Alas! she had put it on for _him_. "Not _now_,"
Nathalie answered, and, looking at the butterfly, she said pityingly,
"a few _drops_ and a little _chilliness_ have benumbed the poor thing."
Her friend reflected how easily Fate might have punished _his_ temerity
by benumbing the even more beautiful, black-attired creature by his
side, who had, moreover, had her full share already of shivering in the
night-frosts of life and the night-dew of tears. But he could not
answer her for love and pain.
They kept silence now, reading each other's thoughts, lost, half in
their hearts, half in the grandeur of night. The wide æther had
absorbed all the clouds (only those of the sky, alas!); Luna bent down,
with her saintly halo, like a glorified Madonna, from the tranquil
blue, to greet her pale sister of the earth. The voice of the stream
was heard, as it flowed on its course unseen, hidden by a light
mist--like the stream of time, hidden from sight by the haze of
countries and nations. Behind them the night-breeze had laid itself to
rest upon a swelling, rushing bed of corn, bestreaked with blue
corn-flowers; and before them lay the reaped harvest of the world to
come--precious stones (as it were) in their coffin-settings, cold and
heavy in death.[116] The pious and humble ones (forming an antithesis
to the sunflower and the mote in the sunbeam) turned as moon-flowers to
the moon, and played as moonbeam-motes in her cool rays, feeling that
there is nothing under the starry sky so great as hope.
Nathalie leant on Firmian's hand, that he might help her to rise, and
said, "I feel quite able to go home now." He kept hold of her hand, but
did not rise nor speak. He was gazing at the dry, prickly stalk of the
old rose-twig which she had given him. Unwittingly, and without feeling
what he was doing, he pressed the thorns into his fingers. His laden
bosom heaved with deeper, warmer sighs; burning tears stood in his
eyes, and the moon's light trembled before them like a shower of
falling light. A whole universe lay upon his soul and upon his tongue,
and kept both motionless.
"Firmian," said Nathalie, "what would you have?" He bent his fixed eyes
widely opened upon her gentle form, and pointed down to his grave in
the valley. "My house down there," he answered, "which has been empty
so long. For the bed on which we dream this dream of life is terribly
hard."
He lost command of himself, for she wept so terribly--and her face, all
heavenly kindness, was so near--and he burst forth, with the bitterest
and strongest emotion, "Are not all my loved ones gone, and are not
_you_ going too? Ah! why has torturing destiny laid the waxen image of
an angel upon all our breasts,[117] and lowered us into the chill life?
Oh! the soft image melts away, and there is no angel. Yes, _you_ HAVE
appeared to me, it is true, but you disappear, and time will crush to
atoms your image on my heart, ay, and my heart with it. For when I have
lost _you_, I _shall_ be alone in earnest. But, fare you well! I
_shall_ actually die one day, and _then_ I shall appear to you; but not
as I have done to-night. Ah! nowhere but in eternity, and then I shall
say to you, 'Oh! Nathalie, I loved you there below with infinite,
unending grief and sorrow; make amends to me _here_!'" She strove to
answer, but her voice broke and failed her. She raised her great eyes
to the starry sky, but they were full of tears. She tried to rise, but
her friend held her, with his hand all thorns and blood, and said,
"_Can_ you leave me, Nathalie?"
She arose here, sublime and grand, bent her head back, looking upward
to the sky, rapidly swept away the tears from her eyes; her soaring
soul found words, and, clasping her hands in prayer, she said, "Oh!
THOU who art all love, and lovest ALL, he has been lost to me, I have
found him again; eternity is here on earth; make THOU him happy through
me!" And her head sank down on his, tenderly and languidly, and she
said,
"_We are going to be always_ TOGETHER."
"Oh God!" stammered Firmian; "Oh angel! you are going to be always
_with_ me--in this world and the next!"
"For ever, Firmian!" said Nathalie, softly. And our friend's troubles
were over and past.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Name of one of the author's other works.]
[Footnote 2: Other works of his.]
[Footnote 3: Second Book in the translation.]
[Footnote 4: The chapters in one of the author's books are called "Dog
Post Days," for a reason therein explained.]
[Footnote 5: This means, in German, one who pays no fare. Puns which
are not translatable must be "explained," or else the sentence left
out.]
[Footnote 6: This is how all these pieces were really arranged in the
first, unimproved edition; but I am sure Pauline won't be offended
that, in the second edition (so strikingly improved) I have adverted
more to the entire German empire, and arranged them very differently.]
[Footnote 7: I earnestly beg that section of the public the description
of which is here levelled at the head of the shopkeeper-captain not to
suppose it is meant for _them_; they must see that I am only joking,
and my intention, of course is clear.]
[Footnote 8: The Koran says, the devils were compelled to serve and
obey Solomon. After his death he was stuffed, and, by means of a stick
in his hand, and another propping him up about the _os coccygis_, kept
on such an apparent footing of being alive, that the devils themselves
were taken in by it, until the hinder axis of him was eaten by worms,
and the sovereign rolled over topsy-turvy.--See Boysen's Koran in
Michaelis' 'Orient. Bibl.']
[Footnote 9: Untranslatable pun.]
[Footnote 10: Or "Poor's Advocate" (more literally). The appointment so
named, exists, or lately existed, in Scotland.]
[Footnote 11: The "Grandfather Dance" is equivalent to the English "Sir
Roger de Coverley."]
[Footnote 12: Wilhelm's 'Recreations in Natural History. Insects.' Vol.
i.]
[Footnote 13: Siebenkæs means "seven cheeses."]
[Footnote 14: Sky-blue is the colour of the order of the Jesuits, as
also of the Indian Krisna, and of anger. The hypothesis of the natural
philosopher Marat, that blue and red together make black, should be
experimented upon, by mixing the cardinal's red with the Jesuit's blue.
Ho himself, subsequently, during the French Revolution, produced from
blue, red, and white the most beautiful ivory black, or the Indian ink
with which Napoleon afterwards painted.]
[Footnote 15: He styles mankind his brethren, as many monks, princes,
and religious persons are given to do to each other, and perhaps he is
right in so doing, seeing that he treats these brethren of his just as
many eastern princes treat theirs, and, in fact, more kindly,
beheading, blinding, and cutting them up in a spiritual sense only, not
in corporeal.]
[Footnote 16: The same robbing, strangling paw is masked in both under
the likeness of the track of a man.]
[Footnote 17: 'Sp.' 547, N. Tr.]
[Footnote 18: The Heimlicher of Freyburg is inviolable for three years
during his tenure of office, and for three years after it expires.]
[Footnote 19: It consisted chiefly of curious coins, vicariat-dollars,
&c.]
[Footnote 20: Plato likens our lower passions to animals kicking inside
us.]
[Footnote 21: He happened to have the case of one to defend, just
then.]
[Footnote 22: The book was published in 1789, by Beckmann of Gera, and
was entitled, 'Selections from the Devil's Papers.' I shall venture to
express my opinion on these satires further on.]
[Footnote 23: The fashionable waistcoats of those days had animals and
flowers upon them.]
[Footnote 24: For the next six pages or so the original literally
_bristles_ with untranslatable puns and plays upon words.--Translator.]
[Footnote 25: Mosheim's 'Ecclesiastical History.']
[Footnote 26: Gold in leaves, of two colours, used by bookbinders.]
[Footnote 27: According to Klüber's notes to Delacurne de Sainte Palaye
on Chivalry, this was the title of the official who superintended the
tourney, or gymnastic practices and exercises. There are at the present
day certain private tutors in aristocratic families who are feeble
imitations of him.]
[Footnote 28: In this last speech Lenette makes use of several of the
obsolete forms of verbs referred to in a previous chapter as "religious
antiquities out of Luther's Bible." I cannot give English equivalents.
Of course what follows would be unintelligibly without this
explanation.--Translator.]
[Footnote 29: The French academician, N. Beurion, made out that Adam
was 123 feet 9 inches high, and Eve 118 feet 9-3/4 inches. The rest is
related by the Rabbin, that Adam went through the ocean after his
fall.]
[Footnote 30: The members of this celebrated sect went to church
without any clothes on them.]
[Footnote 31: It seems almost to indicate a crossing of the breeds
between the grave tiger and the playful ape, that the Place de Grève in
Paris is the place where malefactors are executed, and where the
populace assemble for fêtes--that on the selfsame spot horses tear a
regicide to pieces and citizens celebrate the accession of a new king;
the fire wheels of the fireworks and of the people who are broken on
the wheel whirling at the selfsame time and place. Frightful contrasts!
we may not adduce others lest we should get to imitating those whom we
have here found fault with.]
[Footnote 32: This is an allusion to 'Hesperus.']
[Footnote 33: Jocular discourses were delivered on Easter Sunday in the
middle-ages, and went by the name of "Christian Easter-Merriment."]
[Footnote 34: In the 3rd part of the Lichtenberg Philosophical
Magazine,' the case is mentioned of a woman, who, while smelling at a
flower, inhaled a worm into her brain, which tormented her with
delirium, headache, &c., till it came out at her nose again, still
alive.]
[Footnote 35: Voltaire proves that a person who is 23 years old, has
only lived 3½ years in the proper sense of the word.]
[Footnote 36: The poisonous Boa Upas, beneath which one loses one's
hair in a few minutes.]
[Footnote 37: The musicians among the ancients wore them. Bartholin de
Tib. Vet. iii. 4.]
[Footnote 38: The common German dinner-time then.--Translator.]
[Footnote 39: So do men forget it, though in a lesser degree. Suppose a
man who does ninety things every day, accurately remembering them,
should once or twice forget a ninety-first thing, he'll go on
forgetting that afterwards, though he remembers all the rest. There's
no remedy for this unless some person happens to come in, or something
chances to occur just at the instant of forgetting, and recalls the
ninety-first thing to his mind. If he once forgets to forget, he won't
forget any more.]
[Footnote 40: According to the Rabbin, the pains of the damned are
intermitted on the Sabbath; the Christians hold that the same was the
case during the descent into Hades.]
[Footnote 41: In Bern and the Pays-du-Vaud, two male witnesses, or four
female, are necessary for a legal proof.]
[Footnote 42: The sand-glass is upright during the time the torture
goes on.]
[Footnote 43: We cannot say, however, that it is by carrying away
noxious vapours that the wind purifies the air, since while it blows
_my_ noxious emanations to the person behind me, it brings me those of
the person before me; and because stagnant water does not become putrid
solely because there is no current to carry away decaying matter.]
[Footnote 44: A woman finds it much easier to yield and say nothing
when she is in the right than when she is in the wrong.]
[Footnote 45: Heller = half-a-farthing.]
[Footnote 46: _I.e_. a sum which people pay to the exchequer for
permission to leave the country.]
[Footnote 47: Jews were formerly obliged to stand with bare feet on
pig's-skin when they took oath.]
[Footnote 48: Animals may not carry anything on the Schabbes; even the
lappets which fowls sometimes have tied to them as marks of
distinction, have to be taken off on that day; and the Jews must get
non-Jews to milk for them; they may not even wipe off dust or moisture
from their persons.]
[Footnote 49: Prizelius trained war-horses to stand the beating of the
drums in battle, by strewing oats on the tops of drums, and beating on
the lower side of them while the horses ate the oats as they jumped
about on the top.]
[Footnote 50: There is no plant with eleven stamens.]
[Footnote 51: Two holes in a hazel-nut show that the beetle which
gnawed away its kernel, in the shape of a little larval worm, has crept
out in its transformed state.]
[Footnote 52: Allusion to the fable that the male birds of paradise
hatch the eggs on the backs of the females up in air.]
[Footnote 53: Particularly on cold bright winter mornings and evenings.
I (and Siebenkæs for the same reason) have been troubled with this
complaint for more than twenty years, and I have had an attack
of it on this coldest of Christmas eves, just as I was describing
it. It is nothing but a passing paralysis of the nerves of the
lungs--particularly of the _nervus vagus_--and in course of time (for
you see even twenty years have not been enough), lends to that
pulmonary apoplexy which Leville in Paris, und recently Hohnbaum, have
held to be a new form of the disease, and which, perhaps, after the
precedent of "Miller's Asthma," may receive the name of "Siebenkæsian,"
or "Jean Paulish apoplexy."]
[Footnote 54: Buffon.]
[Footnote 55: The husband should always play the lover by rights--and
the lover the husband. It is impossible to describe the amount of
soothing influence which little acts of politeness and innocent
flatteries exercise upon just the very people who usually expect, and
receive, none--wives, sisters, relations--and this even when they quite
understand what this politeness really amounts to. We ought to be
applying this emollient pomade to our rude rough lips all day long,
even if we have only three words to speak,--and we should have a
similar one for our hands, to soften down their actions. I trust that I
shall always keep my resolution never to flatter any woman, not even my
own wife, but I know I shall begin to break it four months and a-half
after my betrothal, and go on breaking it all my life.]
[Footnote 56: Sander, on "The Great and Beautiful in Nature."]
[Footnote 57: The anchor proof consists in casting the anchor forcibly
down upon a deep hard bottom.]
[Footnote 58: Servants were _called_ "knaves" of old, and deserve the
name pretty often at the present day.]
[Footnote 59: Lack of money and of health.]
[Footnote 60: One continued until fainting supervenes.]
[Footnote 61: Persons condemned by the secret tribunals were so
styled.]
[Footnote 62: The former plant opens after eight in the morning, the
latter at eleven.]
[Footnote 63: It is explained in a long note in the original, that she
_could_ do this even before being married.]
[Footnote 64: The Silhouette took its name from the Controller-General
so called. In Paris, an empty, blank physiognomy is called a face "à la
silhouette."]
[Footnote 65: Which are called "weavers' ships" in German.]
[Footnote 66: In Engelhardszell, for instance, the Austrian
custom-house officers unbutton paunches to see whether they be fat--or
cloth.]
[Footnote 67: We have all read in the newspapers that at the Vienna
balls a paper lantern is carried through the rooms, with the
inscription "Supper ready." This may be called Vienna lanterning.]
[Footnote 68: Alas! that the English word "friend" is such a poor
representative of the German original. Yet I cannot hit upon any
other.--_Tr_.]
[Footnote 69: Death sends sleep, Heaven the dream.]
[Footnote 70: In all this discussion what we are talking of is not that
_practical_ love of our fellow men, and of our enemies, which expresses
itself in action, and in refraining from revenge (and which must be
easy to every properly constituted person), but that _feeling_ of
misanthropy, or of philanthropy (as the case may be), over which the
moral sense has but little power--of inward love, as distinct from
actions; of secret indignation with sinners and fools. It is easier to
sacrifice one's self for people than to love them--easier to do good to
our enemies than to forgive them. The longing of love, as well as its
seldomness, have had but one painter--F. Jakobi: we do not need a
second.]
[Footnote 71: A paper, printed with symbols, &c., in which the present
for a godchild is wrapped.]
[Footnote 72: Part which a player selects as a specimen of his powers.]
[Footnote 73: A Frenchman vowed he could not abide the English: "_Parce
qu'ils versent du beurre fondu sur leur veau rôti_."]
[Footnote 74: 'Pomp. Mel. de S. O.' i. 18.]
[Footnote 75: Switzerland and Holland.]
[Footnote 76: Which was so altered in appearance after his death by
innumerable wounds, that they masked it as effectually us the iron one
had done.]
[Footnote 77: There is a kind of sea-bird which sleeps on the wing, or
floats up and down; and the motion of the sea is often what awakes it.]
[Footnote 78: This vetch has some of its flowers and fruit above
ground, but most of them _under_ it; though the latter are
white.--Linnæus.]
[Footnote 79: At page 163 of the 'Pocket-Book for Watering Places, and
Visitors to them,' it is stated that while the ladies are lying bolted
into their baths, young gentlemen sit on the covers and entertain them
while they are under water. Against which arrangement _Reason_
certainly can urge no valid objection, for the wood of the baths is
quite as thick as silk; and when all is said, Everybody is, if covered
at all, always in some covering _inside_ of which he or she is
altogether _devoid_ of covering--though perhaps _Fancy_, and
_Imagination_ may urge this objection, that a bed-quilt a quarter of a
yard thick would not be quite so becoming, or close-fitting a
ball-dress as a gauze. If once the Innocence of the imagination be
offended, there is no other to spare; the senses cut neither be
innocent nor the contrary.]
[Footnote 80: The white-flowering sort would weep--the red-flowering
sort would storm, as the pale moon indicates rainy weather, and the red
moon high wind. (_Pallida luna pluit, rubicunda fiat_.)]
[Footnote 81: In the neighbourhood of Comorn (Windisch's 'Geography of
Hungary'). Buchan mentions a similar twin-birth in Scotland.]
[Footnote 82: There was a superstition that the Headsman's sword moved,
of itself, before cutting off somebody's head.]
[Footnote 83: Who distinguished himself by _painting_ thistles as much
as Swift by _writing_ them.]
[Footnote 84: There is nothing more unreasonable, uncontrollable, and
inexplicable, than this feeling of repugnance to the unclean--this
inconsistent alliance between the will and the coats of the stomach.
Cicero says, "the modest do not willingly use the word 'modesty'" (a
transcendental form of disgust with the impure)--and those who feel the
repugnance in question deal with it in a similar manner, particularly
as bodily and moral purity are neighbours (which the chaste and cleanly
Swift exemplified in his own person). Even physical loathing (of which
the subject-matter is mental, more than physical), affects the moral
sense more than is supposed. Cross the street with undigested food, or
antimonial wine, in your stomach, and you will feel a stronger distaste
to a score of faces (and for more books when you come home) than at
ordinary times.]
[Footnote 85: A beggar in England who keeps a shop full of crutches,
eye-plaster, false legs, &c., which every one who wants to be lame,
blind, &c., must be supplied with. 'Britt. Annal.']
[Footnote 86: The Rabbis maintain that Cain killed his brother because
the latter disagreed with him when he (Cain) denied the immortality of
the soul. So that the first murder was an _auto-da-fe_, and the first
war a religious one.]
[Footnote 87: According to de Luc, in the third volume of his 'Little
Journeys for Amateur Travellers.']
[Footnote 88: That is, to himself. He wishes his inheritance to be paid
to himself, and not to his wife, because she might have married a rich
husband in the interval; besides, he would have less trouble in knowing
whether or not the Heimlicher did what he told him, and could, if
necessary, carry out the threat which he is about to make.]
[Footnote 89: Here follow, in the original, puns on the (German)
medical names of the four stomachs of the _Ruminantia_, for which I am
unequal to finding equivalents.--Trans.]
[Footnote 90: Leibgeber means, at once, the second life (in which he
does not believe), and Firmian's continuation of his _present_ life in
Vaduz.]
[Footnote 91: Plin. H. N., viii 30.]
[Footnote 92: Which, like a greater Psyche, makes its nest in skulls.]
[Footnote 93: King's hearts are enshrined in golden cases.]
[Footnote 94: The actor (among the Romans) who mimicked the deceased in
all his gestures and movements at his funeral.]
[Footnote 95: People who had been taken to be dead, and honoured with a
funeral, had to go through these ceremonies.--Potter.]
[Footnote 96: Augustin, Commentar. ad Johann. xxi. 23.]
[Footnote 97: This name, or that of _Tumulus Honorarius_, was given to
the _empty_ monument which friends erected to a dead person whose body
was not to be found.]
[Footnote 98: Alexand. ab Alex. iii. 7.]
[Footnote 99: There is a pun here in the original, where this
expression means also "to hiss off" (_e.g_. an actor from the
stage).--Trans.]
[Footnote 100: I speak of 1796.]
[Footnote 101: Whatever Pythagoras wrote with bean-juice on a certain
mirror could be read on the moon.--'Call. Rhodogin,' ix. 13. When
Charles V. and Francis I. were fighting near Milan, everything that
happened by day at Milan could be read at night on the moon in Paris by
means of a mirror of this sort.--'Agrippa de Occ. Philos.' ii. 6.]
[Footnote 102: A long cloud, with branch-like streaks, which bodes a
storm.]
[Footnote 103: There is a superstition that when two children kiss
without being able to speak, one of them must die.]
[Footnote 104: "Therefore I foresee that Leibgeber's Pastoral Letters
in these 'Flower Pieces' will, for most of my readers, be insufferable
letters of denunciation or defiance. Most Germans do understand a
joke--it cannot be denied of them--but they do not all understand
_badinage_--and few understand humour--least of all the Leibgeber sort.
Therefore, at first--because it is easier to alter a book than a
public--I thought of falsifying all his letters, and substituting
pleasanter-flavoured ones. However it can always be arranged that, in
the second edition, the falsified letters shall be inserted in the body
of the work, and the genuine ones given at the end as an Appendix."
This has not been found necessary. Heavens! how can first editions make
such mistakes, and misunderstand such a number of readers--to whom
second editions afterwards offer the warmest and sincerest apologies.]
[Footnote 105: Plin. H. N. vii. 48.]
[Footnote 106: She refers to the widow's pension.]
[Footnote 107: Because it was supposed to be in English verse.--Trans.]
[Footnote 108: In the ranunculus, brown wort, the lower part of the
stalk sinks deeper into the ground every year, to replace the root as
it rots away.]
[Footnote 109: In enthusiasm, the converse order of things prevails. To
learn to know what your firmly established principles of morality are,
with more certainty than you can from your resolves and actions, you
have only to notice the joy or the sorrow which a moral claim, a piece
of news, a disappointment, calls up in you with lightning speed, but
which disappears again at once under the influence of reflection and
self-control. What great, rotting pieces of the old Adam one finds
about one still, now and then!]
[Footnote 110: The wife of Pinarius, under the government of Tarquinius
Superbus, was the first woman to quarrel with her mother-in-law (Plut.
in Numa). German history will, perhaps, some day make honourable
mention of the first married woman who did _not_ quarrel with her
mother-in-law; at least a German Plutarch should set about hunting her
out.]
[Footnote 111: Allusion to a certain waterfall which dashes from its
rock with a sweep so wide that one can walk under it, and thus be
protected front rain.--'_An Artist's Journey in the Alps_.']
[Footnote 112: A bugbear, nine feet high, made of bark and straw, with
which the Mandingoes terrify and better their wives.]
[Footnote 113: Walter's 'Physiology.']
[Footnote 114: There are one thousand millions of us crawling on this
sphere.]
[Footnote 115: _Vanessa Antiopa_ gets this name in Germany.--Trans.]
[Footnote 116: The purer precious stones are colder and heavier than
the less perfect.]
[Footnote 117: Waxen angels used to be put into the grave with the
dead.]
THE END.