The chapel or vestry of such a temple is further called a dog's hole or
dungeon. The priests and fellows of this pagoda are the gaolers and
constables. In fact, the times are no more when the great folk were
indifferent to truths; now they rather seek out a man who has uttered
weighty ones, and hunt after him, and (with more justice than the
Tyrians did their god Hercules) make him fast in the aforesaid temples
with chains and iron _postillons d'amour_, that he may there on this
insulating-stool (_Isolatorio_) the better concentrate and accumulate
his electric fire and light. When once such a Mercury is so fixed; and
has for a sufficient length of time had, in common with the fixed
stars, beside light, immobility also, then they can finally, if more
has been made out of him by this process, get him even up to the
tripod,--as they call the gallows,--for a _hanging_ seal of truth,
where he can shrink up into a regular, dried, natural specimen, because
he may not otherwise be stuck as a useful example into the _herbarium
vivum_ of the philosophic martyrology. Such a hanging is a more
dignified and profitable imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, than I
have seen in ever so many Catholic Churches on Good Friday, and in fact
not a whit less forcible than that which Michael Angelo, according to
the tradition, arranged, who crucified _re verâ_ the man who sat, or
rather hung, to him for the Crucified. Hence in Catholic countries,
beside the _bloodless_ masses, there are sundry _bloody_ ones; for such
a quasi Christ, who is raised by a little hemp, not into the third
heaven, but still into the tremulous heaven[168] (_cœlum
trepidationis_), must--and for that reason they slay him--render to his
doctrines by his death the service which the higher death of the Cross
once rendered. And verily the dead still preach;--to die for the truth
is a death not for one's country, but for the world;--the truth, like
the Medicean Venus, is handed over in thirty fragments to posterity;
but posterity will fit them together again to form a goddess,--and thy
temple, eternal Truth, which now stands half under the earth,
undermined by the burials of thy martyrs, will at last rear itself
above the earth, and stand, made of iron, with every pillar in a
precious grave!
_End_.
Cato rode after Matthieu, who had fled to Kussewitz, and laid before
him, with French eloquence, Flamin's plan to die, and their own to save
him. Mat approved all, but he believed nothing of it; he still staid
over the limits. Yet he begged for himself the favor, not to take it
ill of him, if he should requite Flamin's noble sacrifice with
something which would be against their plan, but beyond their hopes.
Would he perhaps mention to the Prince that _his son_ lay in prison?
In three minutes the readers and I will go into the apothecary's shop
to our hero, when we have waited only to be first informed that, as the
riderless, bloody nag of the Chamberlain and the three twins with the
lying Job's tidings of the murder came up to the window of the
parsonage, the Court Chaplain was lathered and half shaved. He had
therefore to sit still, and only say slowly under the razor: "O sorrow
above all sorrows!--pray shave quicker, dear Mr. Surgeon,--wife, howl
for me!" He waved his hand loosely in his suppressed agony, in order
not to shake his arm and chin: "For God's sake, can't you scrape
more speedily?--You have a poor Job under the razor,--it is my last
beard,--they will march me and my household off to prison.--Thou
unnatural child, thy father may be decapitated for thy sake, you Cain,
you!" He ran to every window: "God have mercy on us! the whole parish
has by this time got wind of it.--Dost thou see, wife, what a Satan we
have together brought up and borne: it is thy fault.--What is the
fellow listening there for? Shear off to your customers, Mr. Shearer,
and don't go to blackening your spiritual shepherd anywhere, nor spread
the news about."----At this moment came the gentle Clotilda, downcast
and with her handkerchief in her hand, because she guessed what the
heart of a disconsolate mother needed; namely, two loving arms as a
band around the shattered breast, and a thousand balsam-drops of
another's tears upon the splintered and swelling heart. She went up to
the mother with open arms, and enfolded her therein with speechless
weeping. The whimsical Parson fell at her feet and cried: "Mercy,
mercy! none of us knew a word about it. I only heard of the murder just
now while in the hands of the barber. I lament only for your sainted
father and his relicts.--Who could have said ten years ago, good lady,
that I should have raised a scamp that would shoot down my master and
patron? I am a ruined man, and my wife too. I can no longer now for
shame be _Senior Consistorii_.--I can send off no christening paper and
present to his Highness, even though my wife should be taken in labor
on the spot.--And if they behead my son, it will bring down my gray
hairs with sorrow to the grave."--When Clotilda, without smiling,
assured him, on her sacred word, that there was an infallible way of
rescue,--by which she meant Flamin's princely extraction,--then the
Chaplain looked on her with sparkling eyes and dumfounded mien, and
kept calling her half aloud at intervals, "Angel of heaven!--Angel of
God!--Archangel!"--But the two female friends retired eagerly into a
cabinet; and here Clotilda poured the first vulnerary water into the
widely rent soul of the mother, by asseverating and pledging the
intervention of a redeeming mystery, and concerting with her on that
account the journey to London.--This withdrawal was partly also wrung
from her by her false position with the Chamberlain's lady, whose last
windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had
now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame
upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning
spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le
Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and
freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former.
Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have
peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four
walls;--frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a
great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies
lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in
which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of _Hamlet_.
The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead
man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too
considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen
nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a
slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his
Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and
state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only
as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as
dancing-girls of Golconda,[169] who have their limbs yoked and tied
together as a beast of burden to a single rider,--that his Lordship, I
say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much
as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after
all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the
kindnesses of a father, without his rights.
As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary
cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought:
"So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always
leave that side of his boat which is _sinking_, and step over to the
other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor,
Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which
was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his
little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his
poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the
"ninety-nine per cent fellow,"[170] and the "ninety-nine per cent
fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,--as the
Prince from love of ease,--he ventured not either to browbeat him or to
turn him out of his house.
Poor Victor! the unhappy needs activity, as the happy needs repose; and
yet thou wast compelled to look, with bound limbs, into the future, as
into an approaching, distending storm.--Thou couldst neither suppress
nor guide nor hasten it, and hadst not even the comfort of forging
weapons for sorrow, and, like Samson, to express and--extinguish the
convulsion of agony by shakings down of the pillars!--He could not even
do anything for the imprisoned darling, whom he had plunged into a
still greater anguish; for Flamin's sufferings brought back again into
his bosom _friendship_ for him, though disguised in the domino of
_philanthropy_. He must wait to see; but he could not guess whether his
Lordship was coming or was living,--neither of which suppositions, in
consequence of his silence and of the non-appearance of the fifth
princely son, had much in its favor.--At last he came to be afraid of
sleep, especially the afternoon nap; for slumber lays, to be sure, its
summer night over our present as over a future. It draws two eyelids
like the first bandage over the wounds of man, and with a little dream
covers over a battle-field; but when it departs again with its mantle,
then do the _hungry_ pangs pounce so much the more fiercely upon the
naked man, amidst stings he starts up out of the more tranquil dream,
and reason must begin over again the suspended cure, the forgotten
consolation.--And yet--thou good Destiny!--thou didst still show our
Victor a streak of evening-redness in his broad night-heaven; it was
the hope of perhaps receiving from Clotilda, whom his heart no longer
dared call his own, a letter from London....
I was going to close this chapter, first with the intelligence that the
chapters come in, in ever-widening comprehensiveness of periods and
lessenings of size,--which betokens the end of the story,--and
afterward with the request that readers will not take it ill, if the
personages therein play and speculate more and more romantically;
misfortune makes romantic, not the biographer.
But I by no means conclude,--even on account of the last request,--but
rather prefer to freshen a little in the mind of the reader the image
of the old, joyous Victor, of whom he will hardly any longer be able to
conceive. It is an uncommonly fortunate incident that the dog, on the
third Dog-Post-Day, handed in one or two facts, which I at the time
entirely omitted. For that reason I can now unexpectedly state them. It
must certainly give me and the reader the greatest pleasure, when my
picture--which was even at that time quite finished--is hung up here on
this page.
The hiatus of the third chapter, wherein I paint Victor's arrival at
the parsonage from Göttingen, reads, when filled out, thus:--
"The Chaplain had the peculiarity of many people, that, in the midst of
the choir of joys and visits, he thought on his most trifling
employments; e. g., on the wedding day, of his mole-traps. To-day, in
the servants' room,--while his Lordship was communicating his secret
instruction to the Court-Physician,--he was cutting in halves
seed-potatoes. There were few to whom he could intrust the cutting up
of this fruit, because he knew how seldom a man possesses sufficient
stereometry of the eye to split a potato into two equal conic sections
or hemispheres. He would sooner have passed the seed-time than have
divided a germinal globe into unequal sections; and he said, 'All I
want is order.'--It may throw a shade over my hero, if it comes
out,--and certainly it must through the press,--and especially if it
reaches the ears of Nuremberg patricians and people in offices and
_membra_ of the supreme court, that Victor in the afternoon marched in
state behind the Chaplain and Appel over the vegetable garden, and
there executed what they call in some provinces planting potatoes. They
gave him the credit, that he incorporated the subterranean bread-fruit
in the ground at quite as symmetrical distances as the chaplain; in
fact, both looked sharply after the rectitude of the potato-row, and
their eyes were the parallel rulers of the beds. The Chaplain had
already beforehand looked after and helped on the plough behind a
dioptric rule or alidade, in order that the field about which I and the
judicial _membra_ are now standing might be cut up into equal prisms or
beds. When at evening both came home with great gravity and little
waistcoats, the whole house loved him so that they could have eaten
him; and the Parson's wife asked him what he would have done in his
waistcoat, if the Chamberlain's lady had met him; would he have made a
bow or an apology, or done nothing?
"'O thou dear Germany!' (he cried and smote his hands together,) 'shall
not then the whole country make a joke, except as the court decrees?'
(Here Victor looked at the old, deaf coachman Zeusel; for every
humorous effusion he regularly addressed to him who least understood
it. I will here, however, have it addressed to the patricians and
_membra_.) 'Is there, then, my dear man, nothing in the country but
gallowses and carpenters and officers of justice, so that, I mean, the
former cannot touch an axe, unless the latter have struck the first
blow with it? Will you, then, get all follies, like fashions, from
above downward, as a wind always roars in the upper regions of the
atmosphere before it whistles down below at our windows?--And where,
then, is there an imperial recess or a vicariate conclusion which
forbids a German of the empire to play the fool? I hope, Zeusel, a time
is yet to come when you and I and every one will have sense enough to
have his own, and his own private folly, begotten of his flesh and
blood, as Autodidact in all folly and wisdom.--O men, poor creatures!
catch, I pray, at the wing and tail feathers of joy amidst the forced
marches of your days! O ye poor creatures! will no good friend, then,
scribble an imperial folio, and prove to you that, like the Devil in
the Apocalypse, you have but a short time? Ah! enjoyment promises so
little,--hope performs so little,--the mowing and planting days of joy
stand in the Berlin Almanac so few in number,--if, now, you were
absolutely so stupid as to put away and lay up whole hours and
olympiads full of pleasure, like preserves in your cellar, in order,
the Devil knows when, to come upon them as fifty or sixty entire
pickled and salted years----I say, if you did not press out on the
cluster of every hour the berry of each moment at least with some
lemon-squeezers----what would come of it at last?... nothing but the
moral to my first and last fable, which I once made in the presence of
a Hanoverian.' ...
"I wish the reader wanted it; for it runs thus: '_The Stupid Marmot_ is
the title. The said marmot was once led by the full crop of a pigeon,
the contents of which he was eating, to the prize question, whether it
would not be better, if, instead of single grains of corn, he should
rather bring in pigeons with whole corn magazines in their throats. He
did so. On a long summer day, he arrested half a flock of pigeons with
full crops. He slit open not a single crop, however, but, though
hungry, saved all up for evening and morning: first, in order to catch
a goodly lot of pigeons; secondly, to feast on the batch of corn
thoroughly softened in the evening. At last, when evening came, he
ripped open the crops of his tithe-officers, six, nine, all,--not a
grain was any longer there; the prisoners had already digested all
themselves, and the marmot had been as stupid as a miser.'"
So far the Third and the Fortieth Dog-Post-Days.--Poor Victor!
POSTSCRIPT.--The history stops now in the month of August, and the
historian in the fore part of October,--only a month lies between the
two.