Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three Twins.--Carps.
On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the
heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,--I
mean the residence-city,--but not till towards evening, in order not,
to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a
half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the
mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the
earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance
pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a
year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so
joyously over these houses,--I described it long ago,--and he compared
his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he
said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou _hast_ and what thou
_meanest_,--namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart
in the whole city,--but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna,
and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the _second_ leave of the
pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou
climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a
valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...
Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the
Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft
as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to
overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came
not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A
hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no
addition to his æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the
insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till
now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him,
because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the
apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and
come up with him,--the more fiercely the master dashed forward through
space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward
did the scholar take to overtake him,--that was the whole scrape, but
so do men chase men.
Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the
owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer
ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his
countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her
resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,--this
delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he
reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of
accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the
joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted
stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three
kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....
O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly,
and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have
verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt:
I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the
watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to
my work with true critics,--but with postmasters, too, who, when I
despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me
for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge
his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office
clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And
am I not encouraged to the opposite course--that of protracting my
emotions--by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon,
inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction
of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope,
to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?
The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,--he
and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of
her parents;--but here in the _country_, where there are fewer moral
weeds than in _cities_ (just as there are fewer botanical in _fields_
than in _gardens_), and where one enjoys pleasures without _maîtres de
déplaisirs_,--here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing
for all other love,--no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be.
Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved
the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and
would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to
this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations
pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English
ones had _upright_ heads and the Belgian _hanging_ ones.
All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their
blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days
does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended
them,--or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful
judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun
broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,--or what the
reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than
their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[34] which were
the names of the three holy kings from the East.
The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a
phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits
its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and
languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious,
condensed style,--he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his
ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher
and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the
Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself,
that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a
greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic
bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of
the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others
are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some
one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral
freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and
despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds
of motive in the will, still man _chooses_ as well his system as his
conduct.
Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in
affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He
was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell
three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down
unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this:
Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight
dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He
said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to)
that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed
for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself
composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the
favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too,
that the poets could _sing_ for Liberty, indeed, but not _speak_ for
it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic
heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a
similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the
whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing
inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it
were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I
know men are now neither _barbaric_ nor cultivated enough to enjoy the
Poets and follow them; _Poets_, _Religion_, _Passions_, and _Women_ are
four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the
middle age,--that of _despising_ them; the past age was that of
_deifying_ them; the future will be that of _honoring_ them." The
indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women
particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican
sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his
aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the
freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of
expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of
living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this
was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for
which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something
higher than property or life;--when he further said, every man of
culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government,
notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in
_democracies_ enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;--and when he
made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for
the English people, armor-bearer and _Contradictor_, because the
principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of
the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day
was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this
last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution;
because all acts of injustice were committed _according_ to the _show_
of law, which was better than a justice _against_ the _show_ of law;
and because the _nunnery-grating_ which had now been built around the
freedom of the English press[35] was no worse than the Athenian
prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the
Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,----
The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so
must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....
Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said:
"If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would
arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and
every hearer would still cry, _Hear him!_" Victor said, with the
modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old
Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from
these principles that he resembled them;--perhaps at the next club!"
"And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a
few weeks."--If we live to see it,--I and the reader,--it is to be
hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on
the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the
company.
My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the
trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages;
but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand
excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself
a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time
I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and
altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The
next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so
beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with
passionate embrace forever to their souls.
After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do
better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,--this time
it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero _qui
jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynée ou
perdue_,[36]--or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the
kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he.
Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as
clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy
extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had
there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound
carp,--a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the
adopted son Bastian,--not so much whether it was properly scaled (he
passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as
whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a
matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and
fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a
mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of
the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger
than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[37] is after all of small
consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does
important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with
the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.----His
own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake,
more considerately, Appel! _Embitter_ not my first Easter-day," said
he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical
kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of
such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.
However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for
once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four
pounds--so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted--weighs more
in the fish-scales of _contentment_, than the golden _fish-bones_ in
the red field of the arms of Count Windischgrätz!
Could he then stay long in the kitchen,--that widow's seat of his old
departed youth,--among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all
bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without
having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the
pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,--although he had to-day in
the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true
scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[38] at least as a bandage
over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of
the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from
sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose
before so many thick-skinned souls--who in their empty breasts approve
the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows--how often
he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of
lead, were I not obliged to for the reason--
--that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the
promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised,
then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one
think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about
Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day
following to Maienthal,--and all they had left was to-morrow and
to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself,
being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain,
the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she
loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of
Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought
herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did
he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy,
the fairest and tenderest hearts,--I mean those of women.
This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together
in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy
had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of
Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz
concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which
veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that
hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to
give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,----"no,
when she is dead,--then I will weep without concealment, and tell all
men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the _souper_--a parson
can give one--they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to
thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if
I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when
during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to
fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on
the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the
cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy
voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage
thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by
the little Iris and express, Julia,--she can never, herself, undertake
it,--a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and
when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched
into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I
say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou
now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest
from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia,
and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the
thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...