The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence
of Courtly Back-bending.
On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this
consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears.
Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of
them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall.
"When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only
be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the
sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this
feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;[138] and how the latter,
without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt
that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall
of rock between their sundered souls.--He called to mind, indeed, and
right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly
his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when _he_ swore
eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist
had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives
(these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the
favor of the Prince was to be secured,--but his _feelings_ incessantly
repeated to him: "He still ought not to have _believed_ it!--ah, hadst
thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me
with balls or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily
forgiven thee!--But that thou shouldst have done it with just this
ever-gnawing venomous sound!"--He is right; the injury of honor is not
therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction
of right.--For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor
of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly
dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations
easily grow out of little concealments, as from March _clouds_ July
_tempests_. Only a perfected noble soul can forbear to try any longer
the tried friend,--can believe when the enemies of the friend
deny,--can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion
soils the gracious image,--and when at last the doubts are no more to
be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions,
willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the
heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is
easier to deserve than to have.
In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary
forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to
him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified
his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown
as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of
Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills
the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon
sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without
the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[139]
executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name _L' R_--
_sbadita_[140] without a single R,--hence, like crabs, it is finest in
the months without an R in their name.
The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to
Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability
go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel
between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for
the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a
betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled
passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's
justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the
convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been
incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for
the listening Mat it had become a grand text and _dictum probans_ of
his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.--In the
letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his
suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most
disinterested motives of his prayer.
He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom
catches an exact map, the court;--to his heart, filled with paradises,
even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which
one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live
articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic;
through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great
beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.----So very
much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us
who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a
court.--The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company
with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St.
Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was
really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not
fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D----." The Paullinum
was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of
torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with
coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had
loved him,--the Princess more proudly,--only Matthieu, who loved best
to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of
sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had
to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his
duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but
which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.----Does not
even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through
his _Capsarius_,[141]--the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep
cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death
has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging
smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before
those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar
always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom
(as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, _roués_, Orleanses,
are the most acceptable offerings!--Or, even if he can dispose of that,
let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist
who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: _La
décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de
l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.--J'aime dans les femmes les accés
de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang
bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.--C'est là où la
finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.--Les femmes
s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles
s'étonnent un peu.--L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la
raison_.[142]--Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at
liberty to cudgel one another."
The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor's heart,
when, despite his knowledge of Flamin's noble extraction, he twitted
him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he
could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could--fight with one. And it
went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so
sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion
and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the
trouble in the higher circles to assume and continue playing the part
of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as
it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before
people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,--in
the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares
nothing about it,--but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more
contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,--at last the
growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of
love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes
and devours its own vessel, the heart.--Then the pain becomes so great,
that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his
soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else
was added to the embittering elements,--his previous softening; one is
never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling,
assumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and
sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too
kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when
Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to
himself internal lectures upon the whole assembly, _lectures on
heads_,[143] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed
himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane
tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very
people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had
formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed
heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate
these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they
here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must
they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all
Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why
shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid
from every look, every tone? No, _I will love men merely because they
are men_."--Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy
only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold
changeable love of man, because we confound the _worth_ of men with
their _claim_, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.
Our Victor felt as light as after a tempest; the bitterest thing which
insults can do to us is, that they compel us to hate. On the other
hand, he felt now how impure our resistance to evil, which we give out
for virtue, is, sand how disagreeable it is even to a noble soul to
combat enemies without bearing malice against them; for this is still
harder than blessing and protecting them without loving them.
Thus some weeks elapsed during his enforced landings at the hostile
court,--for the request of his father ruled his heart,--and vain hopes
of Clotilda's decision, and tearful retrospective yearnings toward the
suspended days of love and the _desolated_ days of friendship.
Clotilda's silence, however, was precisely an assent to his coming;
still he superfluously announced to her by a second letter the day of
the same. For the rest, to him, thus bound to the throne as to a
whipping-post, thus hurled out from all the objects of his love, thus
fixed upon nothing but a far-off thundering future, in which his
Emanuel after fourteen days sinks into the earth and his Clotilda into
a thousand sorrows, the present grew close and sultry. Around him
whirled an unripe tempest, and, as at the equinoxes, the clouds hung
immovably about him as a great thick mass, and the secret laboring in
the high element had not yet decided whether it was to run together in
tear-drops or break up into blue.
At last he went to St. Luna ... in sooth only sadly blest! O could he
glance at the Luna footpath or at the Parsonage, which covered the
stages of buried friendship, without turning away his overflowing eye,
without thinking how much vainer is the loving than the life of men,
how fate employs precisely the warmest hearts for the destruction of
the best (just as one uses only _burning-lenses_ for the calcining of
_precious stones_), and how many a silent breast is nothing but the
sunken coffin of a beloved and faded image?--It is a nameless feeling
to wish to love a friend for memory's sake, and be obliged to shun him
from honor. Victor _wished_ he _could_ forgive his infatuated darling;
but in vain: the arsenical word which pains me in his name remained
still, in spite of all sweetening juices with which he swathed it,
lying undissolved and corroding and deadly in his soul. Good Flamin! a
stranger could love thee, I, for example; but the friend of thy youth,
no more.
Victor strode along tremblingly before the picture-gallery and
music-hall of his mirrored and echoed childhood, the parsonage,
likewise before the scouring Apollonia, to whom he gladly gave a deeper
greeting than his rank allowed, and before old Mops, who mixed himself
up in no family feuds, but cordially invited him with his tail.--Not
his pride kept him back from visiting the (assumed) parents of his
adversary, but the anxious apprehension that the good people would
perhaps worry themselves to death before him in an embarrassing
conflict between politeness, between old love and new resentment. But
he resolved by a letter to the noble-souled Parson's wife to satisfy
his love and her sensibility.
Then he came into the presence of his beloved!--I remarked
day-before-day-before-yesterday, while reading the German-French
history, where, as is well known, the crowned name Clotilda also
reigns, by the redoubled beatings of my heart, how I should feel then,
when I came actually to see this Clotilda, whom for three quarters of a
year I have praised; for that Knef, and the dog too, are no knaves, and
that the whole history has not merely transpired, but is still
transpiring, I see by a hundred traits which no fancy can well invent.
If the biographer should get sight of the heroine, there would arise
nothing but a new volume and a new--hero, who would be--myself.
She was sick; that evening had pounced like a vulture upon her heart,
and had not yet drawn out its bloody claws. Her soul seemed only the
angel that guards the earthly casing of a saint, from which the soul
has fled. The Chamberlain met the Court Physician, as if he knew
nothing of any duelling. What mothers generally do, that the father
did; he forgave every one who was in high station and who wanted his
daughter. The proposal which Victor at last made to him surprised him
only because he had hitherto thought the latter postponed it merely on
account of uncertainty respecting Clotilda's inheritance and relations
in life. His answer consisted in infinite pleasure, infinite honor,
&c., and other infinities; for with him all was one; hence, too,
Platner asserts with justice that it is in fact only the finite of
which man cannot conceive.[144] Le Baut would have handed over his
daughter, even if he had not wished to; he could not refuse anything to
one's face, not even a daughter. Moreover, no one could come and sue
for Clotilda who would not have fitted into some one of his projects
(the four chambers of his brain were full of them up to the ceiling).
Naturally, therefore, a son-in-law was what he now most wished, since
his daughter might actually die without his having yet used her for a
leaping-pole and lever of his body,--and because, secondly, the
duel-talk preyed upon his heart; not as if he had not by healthy
_vermiform_[145] motions digested the _hardest_ things, but because,
like cultivated men without honor, he loved to appear on occasion of
slight insults with alarm-cannon and fire-drums, in order to steal the
right, in the case of complete but productive cases of dishonor,
pierced with veins of silver, to lie there still as a mouse. The only
thing which looked unpleasant to the Chamberlain, but which he
immediately got over by the fact of giving his word (regarding his
daughter) to the Court Physician, was, that he had previously given the
selfsame word (secretly) to our Mat. As his Lordship, who was soon to
return, could harm him and help him more than the minister could, he
gladly broke his old word, for the sake of keeping his newest; for not
only his _last will_, but _every_ will, man can change as he will, and
if he is a man of his word, he will be fond of making entirely opposite
promises, in order to oblige himself to keep one of them. If the lying
conduct of the Chamberlain, after such excuses, still needs one, he has
this in his favor, that he certainly hoped Clotilda, when _he_ had
given his Yes, would answer No, and dare and--suffer instead of him. At
least he held out this hope before his angry wife, and referred her to
Clotilda's former No, which had laid upon our Victor such heavy hours,
and to her unchangeableness. I wish one could have afterward petrified
or cast his face in plaster in the state into which it fell upon being
informed of Clotilda's Yes. What could the stepmother, the
Chamberlain's lady, who was always the esquire and ally of the
Evangelist, do in the matter further than to make a friendly face and
the remark, that "no one was harder to manage than a spouse whom
everybody managed"?
The formalities of the betrothal itself awaited the return of the Lord,
and other circumstances. Let me not say anything of the love of this
couple, exalted as it had been by so many sorrows. When, to love, the
love of man also is actually wedded (a thing which many a one will not
understand at all);--when in the breath of love all other charms of the
heart become more beautiful, all fine feelings still finer, every flame
for the sublime still higher, as in oxygen gas every spark becomes a
lightning-flash, and every glowworm a flame;--when the eyes of the two
lovers seldom meet, but their thoughts often;--when Victor almost
dreads to retain a heart to which he has cost so much, so many dark
days, so many anxieties and almost a brother;--and when Clotilda
divines this delicate shrinking and rewards _him_ for _her_
sufferings;--then is it impossible to convey to many persons a sketch
of such an ethereal flame, to say nothing of its colors; for the _few_
it is unnecessary.
In every new relation into which a beloved object enters, love begins
again at the beginning and with new flames; e. g. when we meet her in a
strange house,--or among new persons,--or as a traveller,--or as a
hostess,--or as a flower-gardener,--or as a dancer,--or (which has the
greatest effect) as a betrothed. This was Victor's case; for from the
hour when the wish of inclination is exalted into the command of duty,
and when the dear soul delivers herself and all her hopes, and the
reins of her whole future, into the beloved hands, there must in every
good man's heart be a voice calling: "Now she has no longer any one on
earth but thee,--now let her be holy to thee; O, now spare and guard
and reward the dear soul who believes in thee!"--Victor was
inexpressibly moved by this relation through the incidental
circumstance that this very Clotilda, this firm, proud ball-queen and
queen of heaven, who with so many energies and so much independence
went her way over the snares of men and under their laurel-wreaths, was
now by the betrothal giving her Declaration of Independence with a
gentle smile into Victor's hands, and wished now nothing more than to
love and to be loved; for this sweet condescension of so lofty a form
Victor knew no sacrifice, no wound, no gift, which would have seemed to
him great enough to repay her.--Thus should one love; and every new
right and sacrifice which chills the common man, makes the good one
warmer and more tender.
Although Victor by the rights of his new relationship found a more
domestic and comfortable life with his parents-in-law; nevertheless it
pained him that he was daily obliged to see the ever-memorable
parsonage-people in their garden, and yet that the iron fence of the
previous duel and the present betrothal shut him off from their hearts.
For the same reason must he also renounce the Britons and their
standing club. Le Baut however thought it an act of prudence: "for it
was known on good authority, that they were Jacobins, and Frenchmen in
disguise."--
But Clotilda's soul could no longer bear the deep sorrow which she felt
to be weighing on her friend, the Parson's wife; she invited her by a
note to a friendly walk. They met on the observatory; and Victor saw,
with the deepest emotion, how Clotilda immediately took the hand of her
oldest friend, and never, for the whole way, let it go from hers.
Clotilda came back with a countenance illumined with joy, and with eyes
which had wept much, and with heavenly features in which shone an
unnamable, not so much more ardent as more tender, love. Not for some
time could she sufficiently command her emotions to communicate to
Victor _something_ of the interview: for I think I can detect that it
was not _all_. The Parson's wife--Clotilda related--received her with a
look full of crushing sorrows, but neither with coldness nor suspicion.
At first neither could do anything but weep, and they spoke not a word;
Clotilda was still more overcome, and her tears still continued to
flow, when she began to relate her betrothal. She laid the hand of her
friend upon her heart, and said: "Now is our friendship severely tried.
I still believe in yours,--believe in mine!--O only this once, dear
friend, stand firm! Heavy secrets, over which I have no right and to
which I have only in a small degree the key, bring us all so near to
these dreadful misunderstandings. Only this time rely upon it firmly,
that you and I are changing _our relation_ to each other as little as
our characters."--Here the Parson's wife beheld her with a great look
in which the old love for Victor still gleamed on, and then embraced
her all at once with dry eyes and said: "Yes, I rely upon you, do you
what you will, and though I should at last be the only soul left."--The
last addition would at another time have offended Clotilda; ah, it
could not do so now; O, she was glad to have something to forgive!
After the narration she told her friend, that, in case the
invisibleness and the silence of his Lordship lasted much longer, she
should perhaps, rather than wait, undertake the toilsome journey to
London to her and Flamin's mother, in order to persuade the latter, as
the solution of all these dangerous riddles, to come to Germany.--Ah,
could Victor's self-sacrificing heart make an objection to the
sacrifices of others?--No! his woe was redoubled, but also his respect
and love.
In this situation of things there came to Clotilda a short letter from
Emanuel.
* * * * *
Last evening my Julius came to me with a basket full of garden-earth
and begged me for flower-pots and for hyacinths, because, he said, he
was bringing earth for both. He had fetched the soil for his flowers
from the hill of thy Giulia.----I drew his white- and red-blooming
face, which resembles the pink with the red point, to my breast and
said, 'Ah, who tends the flowers of man, when he has passed away?' And
I meant _him_ too with his tender bloom, into which may sorrow never
fling its heavy rain-drops!--O Victor and Clotilda, when the lilies of
the earth benumb me and put me into the last slumber, then adopt ye my
blind Julius, and let this soul full of love be guarded by your loving
souls!
"Clotilda! I now beg or wish something of you, which you perhaps can
hardly grant. Ah, come on the _longest day_ to Maienthal, thou fair
soul! Cannot thy heart bear it? Didst thou not accompany thy Giulia
even to the _blind gate_ of the grave and there see her soul soar up
and her body fall to the earth? O, if thou and thy friend, in the last
hour, when life folds up its flashing peacock-mirrors and lets them
sink heavy and colorless into the grave, could stay by me, as the two
first angels of the future world!--For at the moment when the whole
earth like a shell breaks off from the heart, the naked heart clings
faster to hearts and would fain warm itself against death, and when all
bonds of earth tear away, the flower-chains of love bloom on. O
Clotilda! how heavenly to close my life in the presence of thy Elysian
form! I should already be hovering around thee unfettered on the wings
of eternity, to look upon thee, and if I could not wipe away thy tears
with the ethereal hand, I would console thy heavy heart with a strange
rapture! Ay, if man were blinded in the forecourt of the second world,
still thy form would remain as an after-shining sun-image before my
closed eyes!--O Clotilda, if thou shouldst come! Ah, probably thou wilt
not come; and only the Eternal, who numbers the hours of the second
life, knows when I shall see thee again, on the second earth, and how
great are there the pains of longing. And so then farewell, and move
on, lofty soul, in thy path beneath the clouds,--when I behold thy
friend, thou wilt touchingly stand before me,--and when I die on his
heart, I shall pray for thee, and say to God: Give her to me again,
when on her head the flower-wreath of earth is great enough--or the
crown of thorns too great!--Clotilda, never change, and then I shall
not ask Destiny: How long will she smile down below there, how long
will she weep there? Never change!
"EMANUEL."
The two fell softly on each other's hearts and were silent over their
thoughts; Emanuel's love glorified theirs, and Victor had too great a
respect for his friend and his beloved to console the latter. He did
not once ask her, how she answered Emanuel's prayer; he knew that she
must refuse it, because otherwise her heart would break beside the
loved one.
When at last he parted from her and from St. Luna, and she was
compelled to reflect that in a few days he would go to Maienthal,--and
when in his eyes and hers tears stood which indicated more than _one_
sorrow, and which not, man dries away but death or God,--then Victor
during the farewell looked upon her with the mute question, "Shall I
say nothing to our beloved?"--Clotilda's soul remained most erect under
burdens, and she never appeared greater than through tears, as the
stars in a heaven full of rain come out brighter and larger; she looked
up to heaven as if asking, "Couldst thou, all-gracious One, crush us so
deeply?" then she weighed with oppressed heart the heavy grief,--then
she found it too great for utterance--and too great for endurance,--and
she no longer believed it, and said ambiguously, with wet eyes and with
ambiguous smile, "No, Victor, we shall surely all meet again!"
Victor went off not long before the two crowned bathing-guests arrived
with a considerable retinue.--I remark it with quite as little
resentment as Victor felt on the occasion, that Agatha, notwithstanding
the maternal example, broke off entirely, first with Victor, i. e. with
the Antipode and Anti-Christ of her beloved brother; secondly and still
more with Clotilda.
It may be stated, that I suppressed the foregoing letter of Emanuel in
the first edition, for the simple reason--for I had it in my hands
early enough, as well as many other documents of this history, which
nevertheless (for reasons) will never be published--that I feared it
would be affecting; a susceptible soul finds, as it is, too many
sorrows in this volume!--But for that very reason we will not leave out
what there was, in the first edition, of the comic, and accordingly I
proceed.
We readers will, with Victor, take leave of the Chamberlain, who, with
his half upright eyebrows,--they incline to each other at the bridge of
the nose in the form of the mathematical sign of the root,[146]--parts
from us with true, obliging courteousness. I know, when we are gone, he
will let us find justice, and will make too much out of us; for he
never calumniates either from malice or from levity, and whom he
calumniates, him he has a serious intention to destroy, because he
would rather make one unhappy than paint him black.--When I saw him
bend down so to us, I executed in thought a half-satire upon him,
whereof the true and serious purport may be this: that men are actually
created for the purpose of making themselves as crooked as the
_spiritus asper_[147] is. I do not exactly build much upon this, that
geometers have written: If the Gods assumed a form, it must be the most
perfect, that of a circle; I might, to be sure, draw this conclusion
from that, that a crooked back is at least an approximation to the
divine form, because it is an arc of a circle,--but I do not care to;
for the physical is child's play on this subject, and only of
consequence in so far as it partly indicates the crooking and creeping
of the soul, and partly (e. g. by the narrowing of the chest) promotes
it. Even at court they would dispense with the external bending, if
they could be sure that the inner and nobler crook of the disposition
were there, without the sign; for as, according to Kant, the subjection
and casting down of our self-conceit is a requirement of the purer and
the Christian morality: accordingly one who has absolutely no moral
excellences must with his self-consciousness thereof stoop still lower
than to lowliness, which even the virtuous has; he must sink to that
which I call a noble crawling. I confess I do not despise the practice
which the little rules of breeding insure herein, and which besides
undertakes to be nothing but virtue in trifles, the rules, namely, that
one shall bow when one contradicts,--when one praises,--when one
receives an insult,--when one offers one,--when one bows another
down,--when one would just precisely play the Devil. But it is well
that such a virtue of crooking has its own places of exercise, and does
not depend on chance. At court a man with straight body and spirit
would be cast out as dead, in the court sense, like a crab with a
straight tail, which only a dead one carries. If formerly hermits chose
lowly cells, in order not to stand upright, a man of the world does not
need this; lofty banquet-halls, temples of pleasure, dancing-halls,
press him down so much the lower, the higher they are themselves.--It
were bad, if this so important virtue of bending downward presupposed a
special strength of mind or body, which no one, indeed, can bestow on
himself; but exactly the reverse is the case; it will have only
weakness, which with horses is not so, for they can no longer let down
the tail when its sinews are cut. If the Pharisees carried lead in
their caps in order to make it easier for them to stoop,[148] the lead
which one brings into the world with him, and which lies in the head,
renders perhaps still greater services. Hence it is a fine arrangement,
that great souls, for which, as for tall statures, stooping is
disagreeable, fortunately (but for their punishment) never come to
anything, whereas mediocre ones, who make nothing of it, flourish and
put forth a goodly crown: thus have I often seen in the baking of
bread, that every moderate loaf in the oven rose and arched
beautifully, but the big one remained sitting there flat and
miserable.--But we should be subjects for pity, if a virtue which
constitutes the worth of the civilian, the virtue of becoming not
merely like children, but like fœtuses, which double themselves up
in the mother's body,--if this could only prosper in the highest place,
as one must almost suppose, since the courtier _after_ the fall goes
upright again on his estate,--whereas the serpent _before_ the fall and
during the temptation did not creep.--But in all civil relations
educational institutions for _crooklings_ are provided; everywhere
there stretches out in the air now a spiritual and now a secular arm,
which gives us the regular crook, and still higher are the longest of
all set, which reach over whole nations. The scholar himself bends over
his writing-desk under the birth of introductions and courtly
dedications and opinions. By the mere hoariness of old age the body as
well as the spirit ripens to a bony humpback, and the lower clergy,
because they are always looking downward into the grave, work
themselves into the crooked posture.--I conclude with the consolation
that bending does not _exclude_ inflation, but _includes_ it; just as
the circle, of which one is a section, runs innumerable times around
the swollen surface of the sphere....
I would truly have written over this "Extra-leaf" that title as a
heading,--so that the reader might have skipped it,--had I not wished
that he should read it, by way of diverting himself, and of sharing
more easily with my Victor his dismal hours. For every stroke of the
clock is a death-bell sounding out a dead march for the wreck of his
fairer hours.
The very evening he entered into Flachsenfingen, stories quite as ugly
as probable came to his ears; Mat had told the Apothecary a good deal;
but this time I give in to his reports.
That is to say, the Parson, so soon as he heard of the betrothal, had
set out for the city in order to frustrate murderous deeds and duels on
the part of his son. As during his dressing the whole of his travelling
uniform did not lie at the very instant before his eyes, he threw off
to his family light red-crayon-drawings of the bloody scenes and bloody
scaffolds, upon which, he said, he reckoned, as he probably, on account
of the detention in dressing, should arrive too late. The shrunk boot
which Appel had dried a little at the fire could not be got on to the
foot,--Eymann gasped,--pulled, "It is possible," said he, "that they
are at this very moment letting fly at each other";--at last he let his
arms fall back powerless, and sat calmly and firmly bolt upright, and
waited silently for them to fire at him and question him. When nothing
came, he said with fury: "Whatever Satan it may be that has got into my
house, and has made my boots shrink up so, (I would undertake to get my
foot into a leather queue, through a needle's eye, but not into one of
them,) he has the murder of my child upon his soul.--Is there then no
child of misery about here, that will just polish my heel for me with a
little soft soap?"--While they were forcing in his foot, he saw Appel
still busily ironing away at his shirt-bosom: "Enough, Appel! very
good!"--said he,--"I really shall not unbutton myself." She glided away
lightly on the flat, which was, as it were, the skate under her hand.
"Daughter, thy father wants his shirt. The life of thy own brother is
put in jeopardy by thee,--it is just as if thou wert giving him the
finishing stroke!" She glided nimbly only once more on her hand-skate
over the whole, and then handed it to him with pleasure.
On the way the chaplain sketched to himself a safe and sound plan of
proceeding in the business. He would in the beginning make no
disclosure of the engagement to Flamin,--then he was going to read to
him only the penitential text upon the Maienthal duel,--then to extort
from him the _Urphede_ or solemn oath to keep quiet,--and only at the
very last to come out with the report. While he was thinking over the
plan and the danger, he ran himself into a hotter and hotter sweat of
anxiety. Just as he had once, by a long drawing out of consequences,
driven himself and a patient who had a slight buzzing in the ears to
such a pitch, that they both expected the next minute apoplexy and
paralysis of half one side: so, in the present instance, by a
picturesque treatment of the details of an _imaginary_ duel he at last
removed from himself so thoroughly all doubts about one's having
already _transpired_ that he passed in through the city gate with the
firm conviction that the Regency-Councillor was lying either in chains
or on the bier. "Thank God that I see thee without wounds and without
chains," was the expression that escaped from him on his entrance; and
he had almost spoiled his whole business plan, or at least reversed it.
Flamin understood him to refer to the first duel. Eymann could so much
the more easily follow out the management of the case and phlebotomical
table of rules which he had laid down, and, so to speak, fight a duel
with the duel. The silent son had nothing to oppose to him--but light
beer. While he was getting it, the Parson had pulled at the knobs of
all the canes to see whether there were no sword-canes. A pistol-like
tinder-box at a distance was a suspicious object to him. A
double-barrelled gun on the wall near by, with its--stock aimed at him,
took away much of his courage. Flamin excused his taciturnity on the
ground of legal _plethora_ and over-freighting of the brain, and
pointed to the pile of criminal documents before him. When he was
called upon to give him an extemporaneous abstract of them, and when of
course the war-cries _prison_, _blood-guiltiness_, _avenging sword_,
whizzed like a hissing rain of bullets round Eymann's ears; then did
the agony which he aggravated by the more rapid _douche_ of the pale
ale expand itself so mightily within him that the double-barrelled gun
had to be hung up in the chamber: "I get nothing by it," said he, "if
it goes off and bursts, and the lock flies into my face, or if the
stock actually kills me." Now he began in a compound fit of emotion and
intoxication to weep and to exhort: that a man ought to think on the
fifth petition in the Lord's prayer,--that a country clergyman could
with ill-grace preach to his spiritual fold reconciliation, if he had a
son in the city, who during the sermon was fighting a duel,--and that
Flamin must never say he was his son, if he either got or gave the
fatal shot in a duel. Nothing so easily drew the storm-wind of Flamin's
anger out of its cavern, as a doleful voice and long religious edicts.
"For God's sake," cried Flamin, "let that be enough now,--God shall
punish me, I will be lost to all eternity, I swear to you, if I ever
touch _him_ even." This oath which escaped him was magnificent
marshmallow-paste and soft ice-cream for the heated court-chaplain,
who from forgetfulness of his order of business now adopted the
opinion that the betrothal was already full well known to the
Regency-Councillor. "Thinkest thou not, son," said he joyfully, "that
such an oath refreshes and comforts an anxious father like the latter
rain, especially as, since _her_ betrothal to him, I have had
absolutely nothing better to look for than murder and assassination? Am
I right or not?"--Flamin flung up by a single question the cover from
this murderous armed spectre of his heart,--and now he heard his father
no more; pale, full of convulsions, he sat there in silence,--the back
of the chair cracked under his pressure,--he twisted and tied his
watch-chain round his fingers, and tore it off and mashed the remnant
again round the bruised finger and crushed it to pieces,--in his glassy
eyes stood two heavy, rigid, cold drops,--his heart shrank up empty and
spiritless before an approaching and frightful _death-chill_, which,
when a friendship is murdered in a bosom, always precedes the burning
wrath thereby excited.--Ah, who of us does not pity the unhappy,
forsaken soul?--Eymann went away deceived, and took this calm for mere
calm, and the broken and choked voice for emotion.
And in this bloody state he was found by Matthieu, who had just come to
announce to the Regency-Councillor, as if with twenty-four blowing
postilions (from a note of the wife of the Chamberlain), Victor's
victory over the whole of them. This fellow now first transformed the
iceberg into a volcano, and made Flamin in his pent-up fury feel as if
he could shatter to pieces one quarter of the world against another.
Victor heard nothing now for some days. Flamin locked himself up.
Matthieu visited him often, but not the house of the Apothecary. The
crowned pair arrived at last at the baths of St. Luna.
Thus all remained till the morning when Victor took leave of the
Apothecary to go to Maienthal before the curtain of a heavy scene. Here
the Apothecary could not deny himself the pleasure of depriving the
Court-Physician of his, by imparting to him the (probably false)
intelligence, that the Page had challenged the Chamberlain on account
of his breach of promise with regard to Clotilda. Little or no
importance is to be attached to the report, for the reason, if for no
other, that the Apothecary wanted only to cough out his own praise and
disguise it in the shape of a commendation of Victor, that the latter
had known how, with such infinite finesse, to carry out _his_ recent
hints of undermining the Evangelist. The hints were, as will be
recollected, the two propositions of becoming the lover of the Princess
and the husband of Clotilda, in order to gain the Prince, and thus, as
a swine does a rattlesnake, to swallow Mat with impunity. One must
forgive the soul of Victor, gnawed by a worm's-nest of afflictions, for
blazing up and attacking Zeusel with an eye full of the profoundest
contempt, "I know not who would deserve to listen to such
propositions,--unless it is he who can make them."
My correspondent leaves off abruptly and sadly with the words: "Late in
the evening, Victor arrived with swollen eyes at Maienthal, to see
whether on the next day his noblest teacher and greatest friend would
wither away."----We can all conceive what must be the embrace of a
loved one a few paces from his grave. The friend who threatens us with
his death takes a painful hold of our soul, even if we doubt it. We can
all imagine the wet eye which Victor must have cast on the still
blooming scene of his withered rose-feast.--What consoles him is the
improbability of the predicted death, since Emanuel is as well as
usual, and since suicide is still more impossible with this pious
spirit, who long since compared the suicide to the lobster, who cannot
draw out the claw which he himself in his stupidity has jammed and
crushed with its mate, but snaps it off.--May the reader bring with him
to the description of the longest day,[149] which I am to make all
alone under the exalting stillness of night, a heart like that of the
East Indian, which like old temples is dumb and dark, but vast and full
of holy images!