Christening.
To-day is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it
save an hour.--By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I
believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one
should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in
rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that
they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a
few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the
Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling
thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest
to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may
record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle
my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the
blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air,
intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to
the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last
launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O,
without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which
seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off
down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its
flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the
little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and
tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell
was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly
home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which
call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to
moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.
* * *
I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I
left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him
from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the
skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he
set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets
of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He
recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of
office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with
regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his
communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am
afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself
into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to
Fixlein, "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not,
for so it is.... But look in the Note.[63]
At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply
because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was
a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of
nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two
Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which
Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the
_Palais Royal_, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a
cannon.[64] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was
precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the
conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I
strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk,
hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him _Jean
Paul_ before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it
had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric
juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific
decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his
mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the
christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the
mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of
the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some
features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm
portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can
take little interest. _Jean Paul_ looks very sensible for his years, or
rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----
But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to
spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of
us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with
swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of
emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to
lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul),
as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now
(to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his
sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk)
might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in
them?--
In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at
solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at
them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and
seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism,
began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in
Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted
Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal
ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I
protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my
pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling
lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the
full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to
myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an
angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living
religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the
forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[65] and
all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by
a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son,
and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on
the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops,
which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient
question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I
not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson,
merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father
might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly
arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only
changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and
cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I
thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these
soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that
one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man
that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the
theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them,
I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the
white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody
point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a
woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the
describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again
to-morrow....