Wherewith will this book end at last?--with a tear or with an
exultation?--
Dr. Fenk, until two o'clock (for not till then would his Lordship
arrive), threw the brown or lump-sugar of humor upon our minutes and
sorrows; his whimsical red face was the violet sugar-loaf paper of
sweetness. My good Victor was with Clotilda in Maienthal. Fenk kept up
one continued laugh at me as a dauphin. He makes many similes, he says:
"I should not, until the end of a book and of the whole play, get my
true title, as they do not print the general title-page of the journals
till the last number,--or," he says, "like a pawn at chess, I should
not be promoted until the last row to be an officer." It is, however,
very well known to me from history, that in France, even under Louis
XIV., the present system of equality already existed, though first with
reference to princes, whom the king made equal, whether they entered
upon life as Mestizoes[206] or Creoles, or Quatroons[207] or Quintoons,
or as born to the throne. As now one can produce new laws and
novellæ[208] of imperial statute quite as well in Germany as beyond its
limits, it might well happen in my lifetime that legitimated princes
should be declared competent to the throne,--whereby I of course should
come to be ruler. It were well for Flachsenfingen if that should
happen, because I will buy me beforehand the best French and Latin
works on government, and study the subject in them so well that I
cannot fail. I think I may venture to take it upon me to set the poor
human race, which is forever living in the _first of April_, and which
never gets out of its standing-stool or go-cart,--the only change being
the addition of more wheels to the cart,--on its legs again a little by
my sceptre. Time was when a nobleman and the horse of an English
riding-master were capable of doffing the hat, of firing a pistol, of
smoking tobacco, of telling whether there was a damsel in the company,
&c.; but now-a-days horse and nobleman have come to be so distinguished
from each other by culture, that it is a true honor to be the latter,
and that it does not harm my nobility (though I feared it in the
beginning) that I have more than common learning. In our days the
head-horses of the nobility are no longer harnessed on so far ahead of
the citizenly wheel-horses to the chariot of state as they were a
hundred years since; hence duty, or at least prudence, dictates (even
for a new nobleman like me) that he (or I) should let himself down,
and hide the consciousness of his rank (why should not I succeed in
that as well as another?) under the grace of an easy and complaisant
good-breeding, and in fact take no airs upon himself about any
ancestors, except for the _future_ ones, of whose collective merits I
cannot think greatly enough, because the earth is still mighty
young,[209] and just in petticoats, and, like the Poles, in Polish
frock.
To return: at two o'clock, his Lordship came with his blind son, like
Philosophy with Poesy. Beautiful, beautiful youth! innocence has
sketched thy cheeks, love thy lips, enthusiasm thy forehead. His
Lordship, with his Laudon's[210] forehead, and with a face more
obscured and shaded to-day than in Hof, on which the honeymoon of youth
and the passion-weeks of later age threw a confused chiaroscuro,--he
came to us to-day almost warmer than usual, although with features
expressive of nothing but the feeling that life is an intercalary day,
and that he loves only philanthropy, not men. He said, we must do him
and the Hof-medicus the pleasure of visiting the latter this very day
in Maienthal, and bringing him hither, because he had still to complete
here without eyewitnesses all sorts of arrangements for the arrival of
the Prince; we must, however, come back again with Victor in the night,
because our distinguished father would arrive very early in the
morning. The blind one, as blind, could stay where he was. It did not
occur to me, that he concealed from the good, darkened Julius, that he
was his father, for he said, with double and treble meaning: "As the
good creature has once already had to endure the pain of losing a
father, we must not a second time expose him to this sorrow." But
_this_ did strike me, that he begged us to requite him for what he had
hitherto sought to do in behalf of Flachsenfingen, by doing _this_
ourselves, and assuring him with an oath, that in the public offices
which we should get, we would fulfil his cosmopolitan wishes, which he
delivered to us in writing, at least until such time _as he should see
us again_. The Prince had been obliged to give him the same solemn
assurance. We looked up at him as at a beclouded comet, and took the
oath with sorrow.
We entered on the road to Maienthal. An Englishman related to us that
he had seen behind the mourning-thicket--the sleeping chamber of the
blind one's mother, his Lordship's beloved, who rests beneath a black
marble slab--a second marble set up, which the crape-veils sweeping
over it were meant to cover, but could not. O then did each of us look
round him with a heavy heart toward the island, as towards an
undermined city, ere it is blown to pieces and hurled into the
air.--But my longing to behold Victor and Maienthal, that labyrinthine
flower-garden of my warmest dreams, drowned the anxious apprehension.
At last we climbed the southern mountain, and the variegated Eden, with
its fulness of foliage and with the multitude of its pulsating twigs,
grew with a murmur down into the valley.--Up yonder among the boughs
lay, like a nightingale's nest, Emanuel's peaceful cottage, in which
was now my Victor,--nearer to us rustled the chestnut avenue, and
without, overhead, reposed the mowed churchyard.--To me, who had seen
all this hitherto only in the dream of fancy, it seemed now again as if
dreams were coming on; and the opaque ground became a transparent one,
full of shapes created out of vapor,--and I sank full of sadness on the
hill.... I went down at last as into a promised land, but my whole soul
was swathed in a soft funeral veil.
--And my Victor tore away the veil, and pressed his warm soul to mine,
and we melted together into one glowing point.--But I will, by and by,
when he comes back from the abbey, once more and still more warmly fall
on his breast, and then at length truly tell him my love.... O Victor,
how gentle thou art, and how harmonious, how ennobled, how beautiful in
the tear of joy, how great in thy inspiration!--Ah, love of man, thou
that givest to the inner man the Grecian profile, and to his motions
lines of beauty, and to his charms bridal ornaments, redouble thy
wondrous and healing powers in my hectic breast, when I see fools, or
sinners, or uncongenial men, or enemies, or strangers!
Victor, who never made the anxiety of a man still greater, gave us some
satisfaction about his Lordship. He went to the convent to Clotilda, to
announce our visit to her and the Abbess,--the lateness of the visit he
excuses by the necessity of a nightly return. Till he comes back, I
suspend my story. My eyes followed him on his way to the betrothed; and
his hand, his eye, and his mouth were full of greetings for every one,
especially for despised people, for old men, for old widows. The joy of
my hero becomes mine. Time is working at the beautiful day, when his
heart shall forever melt into one with the betrothed, when, without a
remaining link of the sundered flea- and ape-chain of the court, he
shall walk freely through nature, be nothing but a man, make nothing
but curves, instead of _cour_, love nothing but the whole world, and be
too happy to be envied. Then will I, for once, my Bastian, eat with
thee at evening in the moonlight, under the steam and the hum of the
linden, and seat myself on the bales of freshly unpacked and printed
Dog-Post-Days. For the rest,--although I did let my own inner man sit
to paint his by,--I am but a wretched, dissolved, wiped-out slate-copy
of him, only a very freely paraphrased interpretation of this soul; and
I find that a cultivated parson's son is, at bottom, better than an
uncultivated prince, and that princes are not, like poets, born, but
made.
I hope I have material enough to keep me writing till he comes back. I
have, in fact, in this biography, as supernumerary copyist of Nature,
all along borrowed from reality,--e. g. for Flamin's character I had in
my head a captain of dragoons,--in the case of Emanuel, I thought of a
great man dead, a celebrated writer, who, the very day when I with
sweet, shuddering entrancement wrote Emanuel's dream of annihilation,
went from the earth and half under it,--the goddess Clotilda I
compounded of two female angels, and I shall see for myself, in a few
minutes, whether I hit them. It is provoking, that in conversations,
from the force of habit, I give to the people of this book the names
they bear in the Dog-Post-Days; whereas Flamin is properly called * *,
and Victor * *, and Clotilda actually * *. It were to be wished--I have
not sworn not to do it--that I could, after the death of some moral
_blasés_ and plague-infected personages of these volumes, or after my
own, make known to the world the true names. If I do it, then will
learned Europe be initiated into all the reasons, which the political
world already knows, that have kept the Mining-Superintendent from
letting fall upon some parts of his history (especially upon the court)
so much light as he might actually have given; and I am curious to see
whether, after the _exposé_ of these reasons, the newspaper
correspondent A. and the secretary of legation Z.--the two greatest
enemies of the Flachlsenfingen court, and of me personally--will still
assert that I am stupid. Nay, I am bold enough to appeal publicly here
to the * * agent in * * to say whether I have not wholly left out many
persons in the history, who had acted a part in it, and who had entered
into the actual machinery of my biographical sugar-mill as undershot
wheels; nay, more, I even give my pair of adversaries permission to
name to the world the personages I have left out,--who have some power
to do injury,--if this two-head vulture has the heart to do it....
The good Spitzius Hofmann is now wagging his tail, and leaping up
before me. Good, industrious Post-Dog! Jean Paul's biographical Egeria!
I will, as an encouraging example, so soon as I have time, flay thee
and stuff thee neatly, and fill thee as with a sausage-filling of hay,
in order to set thee up in a public library as thine own bust beside
other distinguished scholars!--Meusel is a reasonable man, to whom I
will apply, in a private and autographic communication, for a seat in
his Learned Germany for Spitz. This scholar will not be able, any
better than I, to see why such a diligent hod-carrier and compiler and
forwarder of learning as my dog is should suffer a more pitiful and
colder fate than other learned hod-carriers, merely because he bears a
tail, which represents his posterior-toupee. That is all which gives
the poor beast an inferior place in the scale of literati.
--I now see Victor escorted with lights through the bowers of the
garden. I will only throw out, as hastily as possible, the further
statement, that I am sitting in the sacristy of Emanuel, which is
latticed with leafless shrubbery. Hurry not so, Sebastian, thou that,
in respect to thy previous transformations, resemblest the three or
four pseudo-Sebastians in Portugal; hurry not, that I may still simply
say to my sister, "Thou beloved ex-sister, thy crazy brother writes
himself _von_, but thou hast lost only his breast, not his heart. When
I come to Scheerau, I will care for nothing, but weep on thee during
the embrace, and finally say, It is no matter. My spirit is thy
brother, thy soul is my sister; and so, change not, sisterly heart."
--The good Victor walks hastily, Ah, men whom sorrow has often chilled
have neither in their bodily nor moral motions the slow symmetry of
prosperous fortune, just as people who wade in the water take great
broad strides.--Poor Victor! why dost thou now weep so, that thou
absolutely canst not dry thy tears?...
* * * * *