Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it
natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was
looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station
in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of
flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears
full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought,
advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept
into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife
has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit _your
Honor_ to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received
into the bosom of the church."
I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily
at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had
given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been
as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the
father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those
_Klappersteins_, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the
eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs,
in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk
in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in
such circumstances, who put it on....
--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and
show him how the matter stood.
Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of
man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection
have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers
should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a
poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far
as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter,
to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind
May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were
ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the
wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am
writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and
look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath
it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor
of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western
sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day
been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our
picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on
the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are
laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the
varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye;
and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild
outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth,
and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys,
whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening,
and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.
But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I
imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the
hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have
seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of
these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened
to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath.
From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus
must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his
still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure,
how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and
milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore.
It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years
kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet
the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and
delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our
own.
It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the
_Senior Capituli_, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and
in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he
was not yet--_invested_, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little
thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden,
that there I was to write another book.
I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come
springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so
courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He
looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the
_travelling-gauze_ of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have
thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty,
decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed
alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of
stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting
in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over
the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the
kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good
Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of
ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from
the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title:
"_Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection_." And as I looked to see
where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in
writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the
ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering
gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and
none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them)
can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little
copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.
In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an
English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself
beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into
her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in
which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young
women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[60]--and although
the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she
must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at
the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from
her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must
never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first
rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with
philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret,
all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within
her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to
time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul,
in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is
sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known,
namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and
with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their
Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own
mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that
now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must
have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the
Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the
reader will find stitched in with the _Dog-post-days_, and which had
formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling,
embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom
they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before
superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to
disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into
the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were
gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and
constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous
fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably
springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her
like a little cloud.
I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky,
over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate
too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the
red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our
hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection
which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for
the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass
from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not
this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a
gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great
Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that
Superstition[61] is right in connecting with the reading of such things
a loss of _memory_; at all events, one does _forget_ a thousand things
belonging to this world....
The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd,
suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because
nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I
shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that
there was--drinking (in the Parsonage),--music-making (in the
Choir),--reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the
Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),--and preaching, by the
Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented,
made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him.
Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church
which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once
the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon
himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts
devoutly.
This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and
Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting
off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the
people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians
frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to
Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I
do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its
usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved
for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in
two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they
can pocket.
Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The
Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the
whole evening, been very violently--breathing. I mean thus; as these
gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the
latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied
and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely,
water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking,
therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together
into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in
our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be
inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes
them from that breathing through the _smaller_ pores which Abernethy so
highly recommends under the name of _air-bath_; and can the Gullet in
their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the
_consonant_ and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?--I am running astray; I
meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only
that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for
the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at
my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first
took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But
the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of
my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before
me.--Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which
we little fireflies shoot across with transient gleam;--I said to him
that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the
different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the
setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;--I said,
the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the
world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the
resistance of the _Ether_ leads the circling Earth towards the Sun,
&c., &c.
On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first
theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would
previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers
were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not
from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is
something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I,
moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but
had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had
got a sight of his _Life_ in the hands of the Superintendent; and might
be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would
assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,--then was my silk,
which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a
kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me;
for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his
power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher
one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should
mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common
and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of
his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way
for me.
The main point, however, was, he hoped that his _Errata_, his
_Exercitationes_, and his _Letters on the Robber-Castle_, if I should
previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received;
and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a
Preface.
In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of
splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him;
and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should
take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the
fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday,
when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the
uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I
went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist
at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future
godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may
readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is
that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic
hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only
for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate
with a baptism.
Truly it is not in my power--for want of colors and presses--to paint
or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight
which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day
I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his
joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or
writing.
The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here,
in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular
conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to
take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the
whole people[62] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is
sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden;
and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged
table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I
have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use In my
own.--Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it,
I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the
very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.--
My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is
a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he
preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the
Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all
rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that
case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a _plan_, an
aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it.
Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,--for
the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the
Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the
_Title-perch_ (a fish called _Perca-Diagramma_, because of the letters
on its scales), and the _Printer_ (a chafer, called _Scarabaeus
Typographus_, which eats letters in the bark of fir),--neither of them
needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of
rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil,
wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.--In regard to the
_catalogue raisonne_, which my gossip is now drawing up of German
_Errata_, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if
he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by
which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica
black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods,
&c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political
writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a
hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an
allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was."
Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his
parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put
the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on
furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the
Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It
brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who
had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.
About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the
village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I
chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I
look at them with more interest _after_ my description than _before_
it.