Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I
shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author,
when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the
Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the
lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these
classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through
so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in
Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the
tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly
toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in
easy circumstances comes out and makes----; this translated beverage,
the _Vulgate_ of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly.
This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation.
It is one of the juggling tricks and _lusus naturæ_ of chance, of which
there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of
St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the
witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the
enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from
Göttingen.
I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved
through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we
all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or
unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm
muscles form the lattice-work[74] of their souls. He himself knew not
how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into
this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same
ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend,
whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of
opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of
growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest
proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him
that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda,
those disputations _pro loco_, did, besides, their part; but he was
always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes
refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a
pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too
distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great
sacrifices are easier than small ones,--one would often rather
sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the
gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather
present you a bill of exchange than a piece of _blank_ paper of the
same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but
little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones,
demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones.
Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda
shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most
of her sex, were nothing but sacrificial days.--Then, too, his natural
delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the
conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's
sharp corners.--The fine people give to their inner man (as to their
outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the
sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of
giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the
surgeons, to handle wounds with them.
Unfortunately this delusion about his growing cold prescribed to him a
friendly external effort to show warmth when with Flamin. Now as the
Regency-Councillor did, not consider that even _constraint_ may full as
often arise from _sincerity_, as unconstraint from falseness:
accordingly the Devil had more and more his game of Bestia (in which a
friendship was the high stake) till on witches' day he actually won it.
But on the 4th of May he is to lose all again, I think. For Victor,
whose heart at the least motion bled through the bandage again,
undertook not only, on the 4th of May, to be present at the
birth-festival of the Court-Chaplain in St. Luna, but also to celebrate
a birthday of renewed friendship with Flamin. He would gladly take the
first, second, third, tenth step, if his friend would only stop where
he was, and not take a step backward. For he cannot forget _him_, he
cannot get over a compulsory renunciation, however easy for him
generally the voluntary one was. He pressed every evening Flamin's fair
image, which was made out of his love for _him_, out of his
incorruptible honesty, his rock-like courage, his love for the state,
his talents, even his excitability, which originated in the double
feeling of injustice and of his own innocence,--this glowing image he
pressed to his lacerated heart, and when in the morning he saw him
going to his public duties, his eyes ran over, and he congratulated the
servant who carried his papers behind him. Had not the 4th of May, the
great day of reconciliation, been so near with its expiatory offering,
he would have been obliged to accustom little Julia to himself, as a
third estate between the two others, as a key-note between conflicting
tones. Only the hope of May applied to his thoughts, instead of burning
stings of nettle-points, at least rose-briers.--The friend of thy
youth, dear reader, thy school-friend, is never forgotten, for he has
something of the brother about him;--when thou enterest the school-yard
of life, which is a Schnepfenthal educational institute, a Berlin
scientific school,[75] a Breslau Elisabethanum, a Scheerau
Marianum,[76]--then for the first time thou meetest friends, and your
youthful friendship is the morning divine service of life.
Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him
very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the
balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the
misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly
toward the Senior's;--this, however, did not take away his tender
yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the
face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly
form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit;
his transparent blue eyes--which his sister Clotilda also had, and
which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old
Germans also and the country people have both--were kindled by a
thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more
darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for
a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or
Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my
opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible
material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers.
It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great
theologians--unless, indeed, they are something else great--have about
them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles.
Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these
Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many
theologians; his nose--its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge
deducted--descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin,
closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute
angle of 1^{_um_}, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and
order-cross, which satirical people often wear;--his broad forehead
arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda,
wherein a _Socratic_ equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither
this brightness nor that brow consort with _inborn_ wild tenacity,
though they do with that which is acquired;--his fancy, that great
prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;--his eyes,
colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his
soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's
brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two
glowing cheeks.--For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed
under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several
powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this
tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her
brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which
with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and
smooth through flowery meadows.
I should be glad to see it, if he were to renew again with the Regency
Councillor the treaty of friendship: I should then get to describe his
Whitsuntide journey to Maienthal, which perhaps is the Septleva[77] and
the best thing to which the human understanding has yet attained. But
nothing will come of this Septleva, unless they make peace again; by
the side of every flower in Maienthal, by the side of every delight,
the grief-worn face of his friend would appear and ask, "Canst thou be
so happy, while I am so far from it?"
It were a wiser course, if both were monks or courtiers; then they
might be expected, as friendship is the _marriage_ of souls, to remain
continent in a _celibacy_ of souls....
Just at the very conclusion of this chapter the dog brings the new one,
and I simply weave both together and go on:--
Without any remarkable vexation at the delay of the answer from
Maienthal, Victor went alone on the 4th of May to St. Luna, and with
every step that brought him nearer, his soul grew more soft and
placable.--When he arrived:----
There are in every house days, which were forgotten in the
Litany,--cursed, devilish, deused days,--when all goes criss-cross,--when
everything scolds and growls and wags its tail,--when the children and
the dog dare not say, Pugh![78] and the liege-and-manor-lord of the house
slams-to all the doors and the house-mistress draws the bass-register
of moralizing,[79] and strikes the silvery tone of dishes and the bunch
of keys,--when one does nothing but hunt up old grievances, all
forest-offences of mice and moths, broken parasols and fan-sticks, and
that the gunpowder and the perfume-powder, and the elegant note-paper
have become damp, and that the sausage-sledge is worn out by sitting to
a wooden hobby-horse, and that the dog and the sofa are shedding
hair,--when everything comes too late, everything is roasted to death,
everything is over-boiled, and the chamber-donna sticks the pins into
my lady's flesh as into a doll,--and when, after they have, in this
_scurvy sickness where nothing is the matter_, vexed themselves to their
hearts' content without cause, they become good-natured again without
cause.----
When Victor arrived at the parsonage, he heard the birthday hero of the
day, the parson, lecturing and screaming in his study. Eymann was
pouring out his holy spirit into the long ears of his catechumens, into
whom no fiery tongues were to be got. He had in hand a female dunce
from a hermitage (a solitary house in the woods), and was trying to
explain to her the distinction between the loosing-key and the
binding-key. Nothing, however, could be done with her: the chaplain and
the convert had already spent a half-hour over the school-time with the
explanation; the dunce was constantly confounding the keys, as if she
were a--_lady of the world_. The chaplain had set his head upon
illuminating hers;--he set before her every consideration that might
have moved iron-wood and iron-stone,--his birthday festival of to-day,
the embittering of the general joy, the surplus half-hour,--in order to
persuade her, that she must comprehend the difference,--she did not,
she could not see it;--he condescended to entreaties and said: "Jewel,
Lamb, Beast, daughter penitent, understand it, I beseech thee,--do thy
spiritual shepherd the pleasure of repeating to him the extraordinary
difference between binding- and loosing-keys. Am I not dealing fairly
with thee?--But my office as parson requires of me not to let thee go
like a cow, without knowing a key.--Only take courage and just say
after me, word for word, dearly-bought christian beast."--She did so at
last, and when she had done, he said joyfully, "Now thou pleasest thy
teacher, and attend further."--Out of doors she recapitulated it
all, and had comprehended it all very well, except that instead of
"Bind- und Löse-Schlüssel" (keys) she always caught it "Bind- und
Löse-_Schüssel_" (dishes).--
The three-twins had a miserable plan of not coming till after
dinner.--The soul of the red Appel was exhaling for this very occasion
a wild-game flavor, and smelt like burnt milk-porridge, and complained
that she alone had all the labor on her shoulders, and when Agatha
offered to fly to her assistance, she said: "I can do it, thank God! as
well as thou!" The Regency-Councillor had arrived, but unfortunately
had run out into the fields again till dinner-time,--Agatha's face had
been crystallized into a rock-cellar by the coldness of her brother
towards Victor,--only the parson's wife was the parson's wife; not
merely one mother-country, but one breath of love linked her heart to
his, and it was impossible for her to be angry with him. She loved a
maiden, if he praised her; had she been without a husband, she would
have been either his love-letter-writer or his letter-carrier.
--Thus do women love--without measure! often, too, they hate in the
same way.--To this my correspondent adds further, that he could draw
from the watering-village a whole protocol of depositions in evidence
that the Parson's wife not merely always, but even on the present
Ventose and Pluviose[80] day, was able to endure and live through it
with the unvarnished composure of a Christian woman, if any one let
anything fall, a cup or a word. For such a state of mind,--for apathy
under the present, entire loss of a soup-tureen, or rinsing-bowl, or
fruit-dish,--there is needed perhaps as much health as reason.
--At last in the evening, the Page came in and said, Flamin was still
in the garden. Victor received it, as if it were said to him, and went
out carrying his oppressed heart to meet another troubled one: Flamin
he found in an embowered nook staring up with all his eyes at the
wax-image of the rejected friend; Victor's heart moved heavily as if
through tears in his overladen breast. Flamin's face was covered, not
with the panoply of wrath, but with the funeral veil of sorrow. For
here in the foreground of a bright, warm youth, as it were on the
classic soil of a former, irreplaceable love, he became too warm and
too tender,--in the village he revoked his hardness in the city,--and
what was still more, only friends of his friend, only affectionate
eulogies on the despised darling, overwhelmed and warmed his
impoverished heart, and he could here still more easily excuse than
spare him. Victor welcomed him with the soft voice of a subdued heart,
but he only half spoke either his thoughts or his words. Victor gazed
deep down into the soul which mourned for friendship; for only a heart
sees a heart; so only the great man sees great men, as one sees
mountains only from mountains. He held it therefore as no sign of
resentment, when Flamin slowly walked away from him; but he must needs,
left so alone there, turn away his eyes from the consecrated corner of
the garden, where their friendship had once opened its blossoms, and
from the sacrificial bower where he had interceded with his father for
Flamin's and Clotilda's union, and from the high observatory, the Tabor
of friendship's transfiguration, from all these burial-places of a
fairer time he must needs avert his eyes, in order to endure the poorer
present. But that which he would not look upon, he represented so much
the more vividly to his mind.
Now the Vesper-bell extended its melancholy vibrations even to the
hearts of men,--past times sent the tones, and the evening-lamentations
sank like ardent entreaties into the souls of the sundered friends: "O
be reconciled and walk together! Is then life so long that men may
venture to be angry with each other? Are then good souls so numerous,
that they can fly from each other? O these tones have floated around
many a heap of the ashes of mortality, around many a stiffened heart
full of love, around many closed lips full of fury,--O transitory
creatures, love, love each other!"--Victor followed willingly (for he
wept) after his friend, and found him standing by the bed whereon
Eymann caused the F of his name to grow green on the cole-rape-plants,
and he was silent, because he knew that for all _sympathetic_ cures
_silence_ is needed. O, such an hour of deepening silence, when friends
stand beside each other like strangers, and compare the silence with
the old outpouring, has too many heart-stings, and a thousand smothered
tears, and for words sighs!
Victor, so near to his friend, and as during the talking his better
soul, like nightingales during concerts, grew louder and louder, would
fain, from minute to minute, have fallen upon that noble face, on those
lips rounded for the kiss of reconciliation,--but he started back at
the thought of the recent repulse. He saw now how Flamin stepped
farther and farther into the bed, and slowly trod down the heart leaves
of the cole-rape, and crushed them asunder; at last he observed that
this trampling out of the blooming name was merely the dumb language of
disconsolateness, which wanted to say: "I hate my tormented self,
and I could crush it as I do my name here: for whom should it stand
here?"--This snatched blood from Victor's heart and from his eye tears
which had been brushed away, and he took gently the long withdrawn
hand, to lead him away from the suicide of his name. But Flamin turned
his quivering face side-wise toward the waxen shadow of his friend and
rigidly crooking his head away stared up at it.--"Best Flamin!" said
Victor with the tone of the deepest emotion, and pressed the burning
hand. Then Flamin tore it out of his, and with his two fists pressed
back the tear-drops into his eyes, and breathed loud,--and said in a
choked voice, "Victor!" and turned round with great tears and said in a
still more muffled tone, "Love me again!"--And they rushed into each
other's arms, and Victor answered, "For ever and ever do I love thee,
thou hast indeed never offended me"; and Flamin, glowing and dying,
stammered, "Only take my beloved, and remain my friend."--For a long
time Victor could not speak, and their cheeks and their tears united
burned on each other, till at last he was able to say: "O thou! O thou!
thou noble man! But thou art in error somewhere!--Now will we forsake
each other no more, now will we remain so forever.--Ah, how
inexpressibly shall we _one day_ love each other, when my father
comes!"
At this moment the Parson's wife, who was perhaps anxious about both,
came to call them in, and Flamin in his softened mood honored her,
which he seldom did, with a filial embrace; and from four eyes swollen
with weeping she read with delight the renewal of their imperishable
covenant.
Nothing moves man more than the spectacle of a reconciliation; our
weaknesses are not too dearly purchased by the hours of their
forgiveness, and the angel, who should never feel wrath, must envy the
mortal who conquers it.--When thou forgivest, then is man who inflicts
wounds on thy heart the sea-worm that drills through the shell of the
mussel, which closes the openings with pearls.
This reconciliation drew after it one with fortune, as it were,--the
_Brumaire_-evening became a _Floréal_[81] evening,--the three-twins ate
of the remains of Appel's roasted glory,--the Parson had nothing to do
any longer with any other keys than the loosing-keys, the spiritual
music-keys,--and the birthday feast had bloomed out into a feast
of the covenant, an opposition club, where all, but in a higher sense
than that of Quakers and merchants, called each other _friend_. The
three-twins delivered old-British speeches, which only freemen could
understand. Victor wondered at the universal frankness before such a
stinging gad-fly as Matthieu,--but the Englishmen cared for nothing.
The Parson sent off heart-felt prayers, and said: "He, for his part,
took little notice of what they did, and only begged them to harangue
more softly, that he might not get the name of allowing pietistic
conventicles in his parsonage; meanwhile he relied entirely upon
Messrs. the Court-Physician and the Court-Page, who would certainly
insure him against a fine; otherwise he would not let wife and son join
in the conversation." The Parson's wife preferred reminiscences of her
free native land to the best calumnies and fashions. Victor must needs
to-day keep his promise of putting his Republican Orthodoxy beyond
question; and as he gave the same in our hearing, we will also help see
how he keeps it, and whether he is an old-Briton.
He imitated mostly the style which he had last read or--as
to-day--heard; therefore he spoke in the sententious manner of the
burning-cold Englishman of the three.
"No state is free but that which loves itself; the measure of
patriotism is the measure of freedom. What, then, is now this Freedom!
History is the _Place La-Morgue_[82] where every one seeks the dead
kinsmen of his heart: ask the mighty dead of Sparta, Athens, and Rome,
what freedom is! Their perpetual festival days, their games, their
eternal wars, their constant sacrifices of property and life, their
contempt of riches, of trade, and of mechanics, cannot make the
fiscal prosperity of a country the goal of freedom. But the logical
despot must assiduously promote the material well-being of his
negro-plantation. The tyranny or the mildness, the injustice or the
virtue of an individual, constitute so little the distinction between a
servile and a free form of government, that Rome was a slave under the
Antonines, and free under Sulla.[83]--Not every Union, but the object
of the Union, not the uniting under common laws, but the import of
those laws, give the soul the wings of patriotism; for otherwise every
Hansa, every trade-league, were a Pythagorean Society and would create
Spartans. That for which man gives blood and goods must be something
higher than either;--not in defence of his own life and property
has the good man so much valor as he has when he contends for
another's;--the mother risks nothing for herself and everything for her
child;--in short, only for what is nobler than self in himself, for
virtue, does man open his veins and offer his spirit; only the
Christian martyr names this virtue _Faith_, the Barbarian, _Honor_, the
Republican, _Freedom_.
"--Take ten men, shut them up in ten different islands: neither of them
(I have not selected cosmopolites) will love or defend either of the
others, if he meets him in his canoe, but will merely, like an innocent
uncultivated beast, let him pass unharmed. But throw them together on
_one_ island,[84] then they will make mutual conditions of living
together, of common defence, &c., i. e. laws; now they have
more frequent enjoyment of use and right, consequently of their
personality, which distinguishes them from mere tools, consequently of
their freedom. Before, on their ten islands, they have been rather
_unrestrained_ than _free_. The more the objects of their laws rise in
dignity, the more they see that law concerns the inner man more than
the rubbish heap it protects, right more than property, and that the
noble man fights for his goods, his rights, his life, not on account of
their importance, but on account of his own dignity.--I will look at
the matter on another side, in order to defend the proposition with
which I began the discourse. When a people hates its constitution,
then the object of its constitution, i. e. of its union, is lost.
Love of the constitution, and love for one's fellow-citizens as
fellow-citizens, are one. I start with this principle: If all men were
wise and good, then they would be all alike consequently friendly. As
that is not so, accordingly Nature makes up for this goodness by
similarity of motives, by community of object, by living together, &c.,
and by these bonds--of connubial, of brotherly and sisterly and of
friendly affection--holds our smooth, slippery hearts together at
different distances. Thus she educates our heart to the higher warmth.
The State gives it a still greater, for the citizen loves the man even
more in the citizen, than the brother loves him in the brother, the
father in the son. The love of country is nothing but a restricted
cosmopolitan love; and the higher philanthropy is the philosopher's
enlarged patriotism for the whole earth. In my younger years the mass
of men was often painful to me, because I felt myself incapable of
loving 1000 millions at once; but the heart of man takes more into
itself than his head, and the better man must needs despise himself, if
his arms should reach only round a single planet...."
* * * * *
--Now, as in a drama, I set only the names of the players before their
remarks. The coldly-philosophical _Balthazar_: "Then must the whole
earth become one day a single state, a universal republic; Philosophy
must approve wars, misanthropy, in short all possible contradictions to
morality, so long as there are still two states. There must one day be
a national convention of Humanity; the kingdoms are the
municipalities."
_Matthieu_: "We are only just living now, then, in the 11th of October
and a little in the 4th of August."[85]
_Victor_: "We see, like David, our Solomon's Temple only in dreams, and
in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a
sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they
had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the
ideal, not the reverse."
The ardently-philosophical _Melchior_: "Most modern movements are only
the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig[86] and grasping at his
bloody scalp.--But the falling stalactite of regentship forms at last
with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people."
_Flamin_: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves,
and Europeans Negroes?--Must not always the prosperity of the whole be
based upon individual victims, just as one class must devote itself to
tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?"
_Cato_ the elder: "Then I spit on _the whole_ if I am the victim, and
despise myself if I am the whole."
_Balthazar_: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the
sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote
suffer for the whole."
_Matthieu_: "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus."
_Victor_: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be
preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."[87]--
_Melchior_: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more
excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a
failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must
be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state
enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents,
but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is
distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget
each other."--
_Victor_: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your assertion shows to nations
two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild
clutchings at the _dial plate-wheel_ of Time, which is turned by a
thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often
they break off its teeth.[88] Hang thy own weight on the _weight_ of
the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and
virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and
be building up the city of God, without the mortar of blood, and
without the stone blocks of death's-heads."--
Here we strike the bell that closes this political sermon, during which
Victor, despite his Socratic continence and moderation, made all these
wild heads friends of his own. With Matthieu alone jest was the only
object, to which he turned everything serious, instead of the reverse.
He had in a characteristic degree that shamelessness of rank, at the
same time to commit and to ridicule certain follies, to seek and to
despise certain fools, and to avoid and praise at once certain
philosophers. Wherever he could, he covered the good Prince of
Flachsenfingen with satirical cockle-buttons[89] which he threw at him,
and showed hostility to the husband, which is generally the sign of too
great a friendship for the wife. Thus he said to-day in reference to
Jenner's or January's _penchants_, which contrasted with those of the
month and saint from which he derived his name: "For the St. Januarius
in Puzzolo[90] a fish was the Dr. Culpepper."--
I confess, I have, during the whole session of the Club, again had the
freakish thought, which, wild as it is, I have often before been unable
to drive out of my head,--for it is, to be sure, a little confirmed by
the fact that, like an atheist, I know not whence I am, and that with
my French name, Jean Paul, I was impelled by the most wondrous
accidents to a German writing-desk, on which I one day will copiously
report them to the world,--as I was saying, I hold it myself to be a
folly, my sometimes getting the conceit in my head, that it is possible
since thousand-fold examples of the kind are extant in Oriental
history--that I might be actually the unknown son of a Kniese[91] or
Shah, or something of the sort, that was trained for the throne, and
from whom they concealed his noble birth the better to educate him. The
very entertaining of such an idea is of itself folly; but so much is
nevertheless correct, that the examples are not to be erased from
universal history, in which many a one, even to his twenty-eighth
year,--I am two years older,--knew not a word of it, that an Asiatic or
some other throne awaited him, wherefrom he afterward, when he came to
it, wielded a magnificent sway. But let it be assumed I was changed
from a Jean Lack-land to a John With-land,--I should go forthwith to
the billiard-room, and tell everybody whom he had before him. Were one
of my subjects there joining in the game, I should forthwith govern him
on the spot; and if it were a female subject, without scruple. I should
proceed with considerateness, and invest only subjects from my
billiard-shire with the weightier offices, because the Regent must be
acquainted with him whom he appoints, which, as is well known, he can
best become at the gaming-tables. I would strictly command my vassals
and all by a general _règlement_ for all times to be happy and
well-off, and whoever was poor, him I would put as a punishment on
half-pay; for I think, if I interdicted poverty so emphatically,
it would come at last to be the same as if Saturn and I ruled
together.--Like a Sultan in his harem, so I in my state, would desire
no physical mutes or dwarfs, but, as occasion required, moral ones.--I
confess, I should have a peculiar predilection for geniuses, and should
appoint to all, even the wretchedest places, the greatest heads. I
should fear nothing (enemies excepted) but dropsy on the brain, of
which a crowned or mitred head must always be in an agony of dread, if,
like me, it has read in Dr. Ludwig's, or else in Tissot's, treatises on
the nerves, that it comes on at first with close bindings around the
head, which I should fear still more from my crown, especially if the
head which was forced into it was _thick_ and _it_ was _tight_....
We come back to the story. The next day Victor and Flamin, in the fair,
newly assumed bonds of the covenant of friendship, returned to
Flachsenfingen. Now could Victor enter through the heavenly gates
of Maienthal, if Clotilda did not bolt them. All depended on
Emanuel's answer. The May-airs breathed, the May-flowers exhaled, the
May-trees rustled. O how this fanning kindled the longing to enjoy
all these blisses in Maienthal, and to get from his friend the
admission-ticket to the finest concert-hall of nature. None came; for
it had already--come through the Bee-father Lind of Kussewitz, who as
feudal-postilion had been sent by Count O. to Matthieu, and had taken
the route through Maienthal. It was from Emanuel:--
"Horion!
"Come sooner, beloved! Hasten to our valley of Eden, which is a
summer-house of nature, with green-growing walls between nothing but
avenues running out of heaven into heaven. The light, flowery hours
move by before the eye of man as the stars do before the optic tube of
the astronomer. Blossom-snares of honeysuckle are laid for thee, and
covered with fragrances; and when thou art caught in them, the
up-welling incense envelops thee in a cloud, and unknown arms press
through the cloud, and draw thee to three hearts full of love! I have
already taken up lilies of the valley out of the wood, and planted them
near me.--Thy city is indeed also a wood around thee, still lily of the
valley! I have already transplanted two balsamines and five summer
carnations; but my first transplanted Balsamine was Clotilda. Thou
seest how spring, with its exuberant, swelling juices, penetrates
through my budding soul also, and May splits open therein, as I am now
doing on the carnations, all the buds.--Appear, appear, ere I become
melancholy again, and then tell thy Julius who the angel was that
handed him the letter for me.
"EMANUEL."
Julius had probably thought on this occasion of that other letter
which a hitherto unknown angel had given him to unseal on this
Whitsuntide.--But what have I to do here with angels and letters? Write
by courier is what I will now do, that so I may have got through the
32d Chapter before the dog appears with his 33d Whitsuntide Chapter,
which, not merely because it has thirty-two ancestral chapters, but on
account of the probable effusion therein of a holy spirit of joy,
or on account of a whole dove-flock of holy spirits, and on account of
the historic pictures it will contain,--and by reason of my own
exertions,--must be (it is believed) a chapter like which in each
Dionysian[92] period hardly half a one, and in each Constantinopolitan
hardly a whole one, can be written.--The Whitsuntide dog-day may turn
out long, but it will be good and divine,--Philippine will shake her
brother and say (she loves to flatter): "Paul! St. Paul was _also_ in
the third heaven, but he never described it like this in his Epistle to
the Romans!" I myself could wish that I might read my 33d dog-day
before I had made it....
The much in little which, with my previous haste, I have still to throw
out, is, according to the gourd-documents, this: Victor set his heart
full as much as I do on the Whitsuntide-gospels. His conscience placed
not the thinnest pasture-bars, not the lowest boundary-stone, in the
way of his enjoyment, and he could go like an innocent pleasure to the
beloved Clotilda, and say to her, Accept me. He paid now his farewell
and professional visits regularly at court, and cared nothing for any
word full of human caustic, or any eye full of basilisk's poison. He
redoubled his fairer visits to Flamin, in order to reward his noble
reconciliation with a warmer friendship, and he stamped upon the past
history and on the subject of jealousy the privy-seal of forbearing
silence. His dreams did not, to be sure, on their stage full of
shadow-plays and airy apparitions, present Clotilda's form (the most
loved faces are just those dream denies), but by conducting him into
the old, dark, rainy months, when he was again unhappy and without love
and without the dearest soul, they gave him by means of the rained-out
night a brighter day, and redoubled melancholy became redoubled
love.--And when in the morning after such dreams of the past dream he
walked out through the May-frost, and by the swollen joy-drops of the
vine-leaves, and under the morning wind, which rather wafted than
cooled him, in order to touch with his yearning eyes as precious
relics the fixed western woods, which hung a green curtain before the
opera-stage of his hope,----a reviewer, who shall put himself in my
place, cannot possibly expect me with this shortness of time, and in my
extra post-coach to the carriage of Phœbus (now in the shorter
days), to give this long antecedent member of the period its
conclusion.
Even the perpendicular climax of the barometer, and the horizontal
streams of the east wind, swelled the sails of his hope, and wafted him
into the silent sea of the Whitsuntide-future, and into the Almanach of
1793, to see whether the moon fulled on Whitsuntide.--By Heaven, it
will at least be half full, which is much better still, because one
will have it at hand in the middle of heaven when one is about to begin
his evening....
I have, after all, by extraordinary racing, brought matters so far,
that I have done with the 32d dog-post-day before Spitz with his goblet
of joy on his neck has made his way across the Indian Ocean.--And as,
besides, according to the _capitulatio perpetua_ with the reader, (at
which, notoriously, the benches of princes and cities bite the dust,) I
must now make an Intercalary Day: I will spend the Dog's vacation in
that way; but I earnestly beg all my day-electors, those of my
subscribers who have hitherto skipped across the Intercalary Days on
the leaping-pole of the index-finger, not to do it in this case, first,
because I agree to be shot, if in this Intercalary Day I in the least
exercise my intercalary-day privilege, though confirmed under several
governments, of delivering the wittiest and weightiest matters,--and,
secondly, because the dog even on the Intercalary day may run
into port, and bring me facts which I may serve up not in the 33d
Dog-post-day, but already in the----VIIIth _Intercalary day_, or in the
VIIIth _Sansculottide_.--The contents of this, like the present, are a
rambling overture to the Future.--
I must say, if, in the first place, as Bellarmin (the Catholic champion
and contradictor) asserts, every man is his own Redeemer,--whence
follows, in my judgment, that he is also his own Eve and serpent for
his old Adam,--if, secondly, the pen of an extraordinarily good author
is the snuffers of truth, just as, inversely, to Herr von Moser in
prison the snuffers were a pen,--if, thirdly, Despotism may at last,
instead of the living tree-stems (for it saws right into the world as
if blind,) saw into the throne-saw-horse itself,--further, I must say,
if, fourthly, every action (even the worst) has, like Christ, two
unlike genealogies,--if in fact, fifthly, one and another reviewer
carries his critical eye, wherewith he surveys everything, not on the
apex of his skull (as Mahomet's saints are said to, in order not to see
_beauties_), nor, like Argus, before and behind, but actually in front,
under the stomach, over the gut, in the midst of the navel; if this
man, in addition thereto, possesses no other heart than the linen one
which the seamstress has stitched in the corner of the shirt-frill, and
which lies over the pit of the heart, which one would call more
sensibly the pit of the stomach,--finally I must say (at least I can do
so), if, in the sixth place, true coherence, strict _concatenation_ of
paragraphs, is perhaps the greatest ornament and soul of the so-called
_unbound discourse_, or prose, which, however, is like a _bound_
harpsichord, and if, therefore, the sense, like an epic action, must
begin at the end of the (rhetorical and temporal) period, because
otherwise there would not be any at all....
--But neither will there be any to come.--These four points, however,
look like the _hare's tracks_ in the snow.--In short: the Pomeranian
dog, my biographical hod-bearer and forwarder, is already lying under
the table, and has discharged some Elysian fields and heavenly
kingdoms.--As, besides, I did not wholly know in the above paragraph
what I was after (I hope not to sit a well man before the public, if I
knew)--accordingly the dog did me a true labor of love in actually
biting off, so to speak, the tail, or second member. It was, besides,
my plan merely to make caprioles in a period of an ell's length until
the dog should have removed my anxiety about the doubtfulness of the
Whitsuntide journey.--In fact, I never wanted to lay out words and
thoughts together, but to save the _latter_, while I spent the
_former_; Peutzer wrote long ago to the men of Ratisbon and Wetzlar,
Many thoughts need a small stream of words, but the greater the brook
is, so much the smaller can be the mill-wheel.--An honest reviewer is
offended also by a laconic book if only for this reason, (not merely
that the public does not understand it but) because a German has in the
jurists and theologians the very best models before him for writing
prolixly, and indeed with a diffuseness which perhaps--for the thought
is the soul, the word the body--establishes among _words_ that higher
friendship of men, which, according to Aristotle, consists in this,
that _one_ soul (one thought) inhabits several bodies (words) at
once.----
--I now begin Victor's vigils, the holy eve of Whitsuntide. It was
already Saturday,--the wind (like the sciences) came from the
east,--the quicksilver in the barometer-tube (as it does to-day in my
nervous-tubes) almost leaped out at the top.--Flamin had parted in
peace with his friend on Friday, and was not to return for five
days.--Victor will to-morrow, on the first day of Whitsuntide, sally
forth before the sun, in order to come back again on the third, when he
alights in America.--(I wish he would stay longer.)--It is a fine
_blue-Monday_[93] in the soul (every blue day is one), and a fine
dispensation from the mourning of life, when one (like my hero) has the
good fortune on a holy even-tide, during the tolling for prayers, and
when the moon is already up above the houses, to sit tranquil and
innocent in Zeusel's balcony in the presence of the prospects of the
fairest Whitsuntide-days and the fairest Whitsuntide-faces, to take a
first cut of all the preparatory dishes of hope, to gather all the
bosom-roses and signs of the fairest morning, and, amidst the noisy
booth-preludes to the Festival, to read the second part of the
_Mumien_[94] precisely in the Sectors of joy in which I sketch
my own and Gustavus's entrance into the heavenly Jerusalem at
Lilienbad.----All this, as was said, my hero had....
But when he who found out so much affinity between his
Whitsuntide-journey and that journey to the watering-place in the book,
came at last with his agitated soul to the destruction of that
Jerusalem; then, with the first sad sigh of to-day, he said: "O thou
good Destiny, never lay such a sacrificial knife on the heart of my
Clotilda; ah, I should die, if she became so unhappy as Beata."--And he
further reflected how the ruddy morning clouds of hope are only high,
hovering rain, and how often sorrow is the bitter kernel of rapture,
like the golden Imperial Apple of the German Emperor, which, to be
sure, weighs three marks and three ounces, but inwardly is filled up
with earth....
By Heaven! we are here needlessly embittering with night-thoughts the
holy evening, and none of us knows why he sighs so.--I assure the
reader I have the whole Whitsuntide-festival before me in copy, and
there is not a single misfortune there, unless Victor joins on a fourth
Whitsuntide-day as after-summer, and in that there should something be
developed. I confess I like to be an æsthetic _frère terrible_, and to
point the sword at the breast of the world, which is reading deep into
my Invisible (mother) Lodge, and play other like tricks,--but that
comes from the fact that in youth one reads and owns the Sorrows of
Werther, of which, like a mass-priest, one prepares a bloodless victim
before one enters the Academy. Nay, if I this very day were composing a
romance, I should--as the blue-coated Werther has in every young
Amoroso and author a quasi-Christ who on Good-Friday puts on a similar
crown of thorns, and ascends a cross--myself also do the same over
again....
But it is time I opened my Maienthal, and let every one in. Only I will
no longer make a mystery of it that I am minded to present outright
this whole Paphos and knightly seat to the reader, as Louis XI. cast
the Duchy of Boulogne at the feet of the Holy Mary. I think thereby to
tower, perhaps, above other writers, who bestow only their quills upon
their readers, full as much as the king does above old Lipsius, who
made over to Mary only his silver-pen. In the beginning I meant
to retain for myself this Elysium with thrice-mowed meadows and
pine-groves, because I am in fact a poor devil, and really have no more
income than a Prince of Wurtemberg formerly, namely ninety florins
Rhenish of appanage-money, and ten florins for a coat of state, and
because, as to the two square miles of land set off to me by God and
equity,--for so much does the whole earth at an equal division,
according to a good plan, lay off to each man,--verily I make so small
account of that, that I would gladly give up my two miles to any one
for a miserable sheepfold.--And what most kept me back from making this
presentation of my Maienthal to living men, was the fear that I should
turn over a _feudum_ to people, readers, provincial deputies, who are
possessed of a thousand times greater palatinates and patrimonial
estates, and whom one would provoke, if one should make them resemble
the holy Mary, who from a Queen of Heaven became a Duchess of Boulogne,
or the Roman Emperor who must on the day of his coronation become at
the same time a member of the Order of Mary at Aachen.
But what then can all their _majorats_,--their Teutonic-knights'
estates,--their mesne-tenures,--and their _patrimonia Petri_ (an
allusion to _my patrimonium_ PAULI),--and their grandfathers' estates
and all their cargoes stowed into the ship of earth,--in short, their
European possessions on the earth,--what, I say, can all these Dutch
farms yield, in the way of products, that could stand even at a
distance before those of Maienthal? And do there grow on their
crown-estates heavenly blue days, evenings full of blissful tears,
nights full of great thoughts? No, Maienthal bears loftier flowers than
those which cattle pluck off, fairer apples of the Hesperides than are
laid up in fruit-cellars, super-terrestrial treasures on subterranean
rival-pieces to Eden, like Clotilda and Emanuel, and all that our
dreams paint and our tears of joy bedew.--
And this is just my excuse, if I deny the Maienthal domain of joy to a
thousand rival claimants, if I as its fee-provost cannot invest with
this Swabian reversionary fief such people as are not fit for a proper
_feudum_, morally blind, lame, minors, eunuchs, &c.--And here I must
make myself many enemies, when, from among the vassals and joint
subjects of investiture to whom Maienthal, with all its poetic
privileges, is given in fee, I expressly exclude old gabblers who can
no longer make the _knight's leap_ of fancy,--forty-seven inhabitants
of Scheerau and one hundred of Flachsenfingen, whose hearts are as cold
as their knee-pans, or as dogs' noses,--the greatest ministers and
other grandees, in whom, as in _great_ roasted lumps of meat, only the
middle is still raw, namely the heart,--one half billion economists,
jurists, exchequer and finance-counsellors, and plus- i. e.
minus-makers,[95] in whom the soul, as in Adam's case the body, was
kneaded out of a clod of earth, who have a pericardium [or heart-bag],
but no heart, cerebral-membranes without brain, shrewdness without
philosophy, who, instead of the book of nature, read only their papers
for law-cases and their tax-books,--finally, those who have not fire
enough to kindle at the fire of love, poetry, religion, who for _weep_
say _blubber_, for _poetry_, _rhyme_, for _sentiment_, _craziness_....
Am I then crazy that I work myself up here into such a rage, as if I
had not before me on the other side the finest college of readers,
which I am promoting to the _primus adquirens_ of the freehold and
apron-string-hold of Maienthal; a mystical, moral person, who
discerns that utility is only an inferior beauty, and beauty a higher
utility?--It is peculiar to all emotions (but not to opinions) that one
thinks he alone has them. Thus every youth holds his love to be an
extraordinary celestial phenomenon which has been only once in the
world, as the star of love, the evening star, often looks like a comet.
But the world is not all Flachsenfingenites and Dutchmen, who climb the
Alps less to have great thoughts and elevations than to get
_sedes_,[96] or go to sea, not to throw a poet's glance over the
sublime ocean, but to escape consumption.... but there are everywhere
to be found, in every market-town, on every island, fair souls who rest
in the bosom of nature,--who reverence the dreams of love, though they
themselves have awaked from their own,--who are encased with rough men,
before whom they have to veil their idyllic fantasies about the second
life, and their tears over the first,--who give fairer days than they
receive,--to this whole fair society I finally make a present of the
_Feudum_ of Maienthal, of which there has been already so much talk,
and go in at the head with some friends of both sexes and my sister as
investing fief-provost.
_Postscript_ or autograph bull of dispensation:--The Mining
Superintendent cannot deny that the S. T. author of this biography, by
the fact that the dog is lazy, and that these post-days are more than
commonly voluminous, and that in this chapter he has actually melted
two into one, is sufficiently excused with those who have the right to
ask him why he has not ended the 32d Post-day till the middle of
September or Fructidor. He still sits with his description four months
distant from the history, 1793.