Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty,
insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an
orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus,
you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single _tone_,
but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our
Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at
his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all
the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was
remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to
paint.
But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place,
explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar
away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the
_Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had
been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at
the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and
fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On
the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round
our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to
the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very
fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French,
were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and
discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them
with new ones.
Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess
him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost
him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not
this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont
sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they
came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in
Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a
Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply
cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was
also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such
esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist
of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these
aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more
than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our
Literature (this Muse _a belles fesses_), and serve her in place of
drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply
because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle,
combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything
he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in
class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he
rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.
At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and
bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes),
and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost,
with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood
into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right
foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and
also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at
the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he
was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so
cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest
enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus
of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I
hold the _first printing_ in the history of a literary man to be more
important than the _first printing_ in the history of Letters. Fixlein
could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing,
in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake
of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic
glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster
colleagues as a body.
He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts
together; and then laid aside the _Opus_, and would no longer look at
it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own
thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he
purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a
sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.
The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands,
hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of
his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to
recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a
new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the
long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains
lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees
in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the
winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood,
uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From
his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his
parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away
by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the
whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from
the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[47] has been
emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the
night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier
than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden
Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother,
bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his
trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying
his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over,
and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and
then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of
Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the
little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the
bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I
nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his _Flora Petrinsularis_;[48] but let him
also allow our Quintus his _Window-flora_.--There was no such thing as
school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his
brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the
slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother,
at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their
stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the
Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings,
nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors
must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large
chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal
shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic
Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk,
our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of
stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then
as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the
unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good
Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings
glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the
whole evening.
About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his
letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing,
and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child
find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of
dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens
itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy
effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the
awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental
tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout
Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air,
church-music of the morning worship.--
Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which
then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the
chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with
its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it,
that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes;
but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the
window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from
the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes
in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the
morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs
into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the
still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering
of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While
their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and
shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the
wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of
Eden.----
--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship,
and a table-clock.