Instalment in the Parsonage.
On the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the
hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are
transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the
proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is
marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture
there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole
came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the
School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him,
like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the
Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the
Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the
heavenly country, no man works in the _New Universal German Library_;
here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing
praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase
of knowledge.... Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and
Saint's day so often fall together into one.
Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old
never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he
was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by
contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover
that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but,
on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to
another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in
spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover,
since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, _deux afflictions mises
ensemble peuvent devener une consolation_, a man gets afflictions
enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined
afflictions--reckon only one for every teacher--certainly more
comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that
school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do:
none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In
addition to all this, in schools--and in offices generally--one is
always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the
recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his
merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and
often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.--
Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up,
nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right
to introduce such seeming _minutiae_. A man whom grown-up people love,
children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling
Fixlein, and liked him-in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but
sport with them; because he said _Sie_ (They), to the Secundaners, and
the Subrector said _Ihr_ (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his
only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged
Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with
Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of
barley-sugar.
To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he
wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their
holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the
Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was
her--son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite
readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off
the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son
now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the
copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast
off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and
was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet,
soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a
_stella caudata_ into a _stella crinita_.
His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this
new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the
other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was
too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies
oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles
those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by _suction_ from the wet
clouds, and die if you _besprinkle_ them.
At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must--for I know my
fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids--without
delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can
nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half.
The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the
murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted
of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the
bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these
weeks of glory.
The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed;
which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to
take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader
afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an
enlightened century with this Sunday-_Wauwau_ at all, were it not that
I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself--especially as
the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby--at last grew so sensible
that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a
greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the
exegetic _rule of false_, nothing else than long life and welfare, so
did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a
lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that
Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered
down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can
Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.
A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such
incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is
beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but
look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,--injects the
venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,--has a
Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the
left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a
song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;--sketches out
the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue
the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and
of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window
into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;--and,
finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and
therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is
to feed five thousand men.----
At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he
can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and
finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward
the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among
the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening
prayer-bell, _slowly_ descends the stair to his cooking mother, there
must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or
baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good.... A
bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a
word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the
coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but
Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer.... I swear, with this I will
satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one
among us here below!
Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon
dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his
heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed
being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance,
could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand
prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.
And this prize our Zebedaeus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,--he
preached with unction,----he did it before the crowding, rustling press
of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the
godfather of the priest and the dog;--a flock, with whom in Childhood
he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now,
himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;--he was
standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day
(what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he
might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once
mentioned.... I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to
checker this sunshiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave
which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet,
heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in
some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and
of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the
wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And
when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly
softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this
day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his
entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,--when he now,
before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette,
overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to
the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for
the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in
the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving
breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened
heavenly heart,"--was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband
sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down
with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like
kindred mourners in a funeral train.
No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a
man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings
with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none
present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The
bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his
own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole
movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his
whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was
glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);--in return for
which, she liberally enough contributed--a whole nuptial coach or car,
laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the
cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;--with a
sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and godchild-spoons (gifts from
Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;--of silk, not only stockings
(though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs
in silk), but whole gowns;--with jewels and other furnishings of
smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the
true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of
Nature!
The Parson--who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life,"
could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no
security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the
depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts--had
now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and
through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride
for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a
thing as painful and repulsive,--I confess it candidly, though you
should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,--as if I had to
take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and
countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light
flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like
tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor
and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the
scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,--this, to the interested
party, maybe as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling
of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning
sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and
there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and
measure.----
From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and
a half weeks--or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant
that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a
comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday,
Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur
on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday
and Apostle's day, commerge),--then is it still more pleasant to make
the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of
an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true
honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.
In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in
the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of
existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected,
celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at
once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials;
to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry
on the same day, as Fixlein did;--to stuff the wedding-turkey
with hangman-meals;--to go every night into the stall, and see
whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of
marriage-present, is still standing and eating;--to spy out for his
future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the
house;--to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;--to obtain
from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull
of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of
banns;--to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool
(because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going
to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to
tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little
later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.----
O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because
otherwise the people would not have found each other,--a hamlet and its
joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still
linger on our Ball.----
I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the
Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made
puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.
And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there
was also floating gratis a vernal sun,--and red twilights,--and
flower-garlands,--and a bursting half-world of buds!...
How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?--Thou
movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a
rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would
have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning
felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill
of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout
away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition
to reckon up that _Amen_ occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty
times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new
chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nuernberg and Baireuth, and there
offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing
practical _Receipts_ at the end of their _Almanacs_, but also for
separate _Essays_ in front under the copperplate title of each Month,
because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common
people's mental habitudes ... And now, when in the capacity of Parson
he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the
congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these
Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow
History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill....
Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve
days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of
the thirteenth, that is, to the