The Campaner thal, and other writings/Life of Quintus Fixlein
LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,
INSTEAD OF PREFACE.
ERCHANTS, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with whom they have any business. Friends; and my readers accordingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with his copy—in return for a trifling consideration and don gratuit to printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page; on these we are now printing.
My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private documents. "With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.
Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third, finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of alternating between the other two.
This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.
The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse sense does; every fixed idea, such as rules every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long, fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.—Alas! To few is this dream granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![1]
This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State, and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors, Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons, what way of becoming happy here can I possibly point out?
My second merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all costly watering-place recreations.—But I must explain these metaphors by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent Fixlein's Life into the Messrs. Lübeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same Life—therefore in this Preface it is less needful—I may show to the whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that not great, but little goodhaps can make us happy.—Can I accomplish this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals; in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at home.
The third skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The foregoing second way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The first is too good for him. He has not always the force, like Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and, like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting than his fatigues. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps, Revolutions, Rhine-falls, "Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.
But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which his children may enact some good pieces from the Children's Friend. Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical happiness into that of household happiness,—then is he little different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to disclose it—who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter, have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is seething in butter for the Author of this Work.
As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[2] half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that opportunity.
Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his half anonymity,[3] and for the first time subscribes himself with his whole true name,
Hof in Voigtland, 29th June, 1795.
LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,
DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.
IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
FIRST LETTER-BOX.
Dog-Days' Vacation.—Visits.—An Indigent of Quality.
GIDIUS ZEBEDAUS FIXLEIN had just for eight days been Quintus,[4] and fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar. These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days' Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet, and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,—or roots of numbers,—or roots of words, — or herbs,—or their native villages.
The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,—for you like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green night-gown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn. The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.
"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.
He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his—whistle, that the manikin might not skip away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians—for geographers it is not—to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields on which the grain was already reaped.
But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial dinner—the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before—is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the Tiers État, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedäus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?
"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedäus!" said the mother, giving an embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.
But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifed parterre. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence—no school-boy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap—lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer's Critica Sacra, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom the literæ inversæ majusculæ minusculæ, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?—Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fräulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know who she is.
She is,—for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,—Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even know Werter) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and hand-maids; and can write herself By the grace of God—which, in the thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,—for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured; her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous, and timid, but too much so;—cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the Verba Anomala along with him.
The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.
Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party—for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted—now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-one Garçons de la Maisonbouche I do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor a Fruiterie of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 Livres 21 Sous,—how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction. Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.—The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the "World can gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.
The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word to-day, " he might visit Her Ladyship tomorrow, as My Lord, his godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Auf hammer was called Egidius, and was Fixlein's godfather; but he—though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes—had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefullest. For, our Egidius Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college—when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (Couche Gilles), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name—for Gilles means Egidius—must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal; he knew not head or tail of what couche signified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their valets de chiens. But there were three things which Von Auf hammer never recalled,—his error, his anger, and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or—get a doit from him.
I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the Vulgata), that is, in reading the Litteraturzeitung, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A school-man that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage—as if it had, like a Casa Santa, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and alighted in Hukelum—was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.
The landlord and his guest formed an excellent bureau d'esprit; people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.—The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[5]
Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,—for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,—I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so caseharden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms—so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up[6]—against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their main equipments, like Phœnixes, existed but in the singular number: one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other ones, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing coro invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he—"fictio sequitur naturam,"—it behooved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking Rutcher-dues, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture—he was just come to the subject of Forest Salt and Coin Regalities—to descry through the window of his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fraülein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the Echo; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into Resonance together.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein—the counterpart of great men and geniuses—was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the jus compascui on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's Gelehrtes Deutschland,[7] he could not figure; the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.
After supper he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle …. By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c., &c.—the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.
Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better—also by reason of our sublime air—if they can catch us in the dark too. Him Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will; her he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless—Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,[8] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.—At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.—Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,—then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause,—(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss,)—and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming ..…
Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping, shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus—
SECOND LETTER-BOX.
Frau von Aufhammer.—Childhood-Resonance,—Author-craft.
HE early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calenderpress and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (Savoir vivre) require."
He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are flowers—though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones—then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,—yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,—"She should soon die; but the god-children of her husband she would remember in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us—as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the magnet—attracted and held fast.
Supposing even that the Devil had, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who—what he reckoned a Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety—was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."
The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass); yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn—she shrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.
In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of the Hamburg Political Journal; perceiving that with these historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world—twelve months ago.
On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to thank God, as himself was now doing.
The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides. I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them; one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.
Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, Clara, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys, that is to say. Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had labored—I shall omit his less interesting performances—at a Collection of Errors of the Press, in German writings; he compared Errata with each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.
Moreover, he took his place among the German Masorites. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their Masora to show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[9]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show? Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."
I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation, they find this number incorrect.[10]
Much also did the Quintus collect; he had a fine Almanack Collection, a Catechism and Pamphlet Collection; also, a Collection of Advertisements, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books, where my name also occurs among the Js.
But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh——, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned who meant to write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,—of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,—in their twentieth,—twenty-first, &c.,—in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[11]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[12]).
Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, to concert-clocks, which, though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross, stupid steeple-clocks.
To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention. For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate letter-boxes. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year, and so on. "Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.
But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother; this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves. It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.—O good mother, rather thank God for it!—
After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk, he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regular little forms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glass-house of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the sugar-trough,—for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,—from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snun; citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had in former days resembled the Sedes Exploratoria of the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.
Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.— —
Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,—petitions for church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.—It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists, not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,—this nothing but your money can do,—but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[13] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
Towards evening—it was Sunday—he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to thou[14] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopalbarn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men, about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the Irregular Verbs with Thiennette.
These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.… I mean, she loved him a little.
He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.—Thus does there lurk, in the smallest homunculus, the model of—the Catholic Church.
So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.—I, for the second time, close a Chapter of this Life, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep
THIRD LETTER-BOX.
Christmas Recollections.—New Occurrence.
OR. all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty, insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single tone, but variety of time gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion—all the time from the Holidays—till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.
But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the Hamburg Political Journal, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones.
Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it—cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of waste-paper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Muse à belles fesses), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.—On many things a man puts a pretium affectionis, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.—I return to the Christmas eve.
At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes), and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost, with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand—with the left he was holding his pipe—proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,—to writing the Class-prodromus of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I hold the first printing in the history of a literary man to be more important than the first printing in the history of Letters. Fixlein could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing, in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster colleagues as a body.
He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts together; and then laid aside the Opus, and would no longer look at it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.
The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands, hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of his cue.—He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[15] has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.—On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.—Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.—I nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his Flora Petrinsularis;[16] but let him also allow our Quintus his Window-flora.—There was no such thing as school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother, at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their stalled-beast—so they called the sparrow—under a window-sill in the Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings, nor potted meat.—About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk, our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.
About eight o'clock—here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his letter-drawer—both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing, and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of dreaming hopes!—The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air, church-music of the morning worship.—
Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it, that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes; but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.— — —
—On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got—the Conrectorship, and a table-clock.
FOURTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-Brokage.—Discovery of the promised Secret.—Hans Von Füchslein.
OR, while the Quintus, in his vapory chamber was thus running over the sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer, entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sick-bed exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, first, of a table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hour struck, and drumming along with every stroke; secondly, of the Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.
As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here than in the Reichsanzeger, or Imperial Indicator.—I have already mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade in Hamburg candles; and the then Burgermeister in coffee-beans, which he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of Flachsenfingen; the other members of the Council acting only as bale-wrappers, shopmen, and accountants in the Council wareroom. A Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of office-trading from that principle of the Roman law, Cui jus est donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est; that is to say. He who has the right of giving anything away has also a right to dispose of it for money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of course.
Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.
My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[17] of the State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the commonweal must suffer in the long run, if important posts are distributed, not according to the current cash which is laid down for them, but according to connections, relationships, party recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction, to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should one not rather expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the alterum tantum than the mere titulary Hofrath?—Money, among European nations, is now the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and consequently in understanding; the rather as a head is stamped on it; to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more nor less than to stand an examen rigorosum, which is held by a good schema examinandi. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates, and monnoie de confiance, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in Gulliver's Travels, who, for social converse, instead of names of things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed, plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of trade by barter, -when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.
From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that often, when I used to read that the King of France was devising new offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could we not at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonizing with the offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not, for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever. The scholastic Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating"; the King wrote himself, "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c., might be conferred on them by sale, as well as the post's themselves? Thus with the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe few Advocates would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common one of Governmentadvocacy), were it to be had in the market. If, however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this reflex morality Government should not constrain him.
It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes, according to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names, exert an influence on men, appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous animals, the foam so often hardens into shell; but such internal morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the fine arts, it is not this, but the representation of it, which forms her true aim.
I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit, Sincerity, and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral Address Department, with some half-dozen secretaries, who, for a small salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue, and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted—their subdivision I mean;—our country Judges might then be selected for this purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins. This is a precious moral Rolfinkenism, which our Jurists have learned from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin into a venial!—
School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic certainly; yet still they are monarchies,—school-monarchies, to wit,—resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say, arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring the young of the community a Hamel's Rat-and-Child-catcher; or a Weissen's Child's-friend,—this to the Council can make no difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State, except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our Commission of Inspectors, when they go examining schools, that they do not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see what is in him.
End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.
Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die.
—And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now, however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open, nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it.
In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire, I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to insert in his copy of the Thirty Years' War, Schiller having entirely omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of the plague, another of hunger, another of a musketbullet; all in their thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is rather to be questioned."
But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing; the only thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account. He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died. First, because three Gypsies, in three different places, and at three different times, had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror. Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties. Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet, and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty; "however," said he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in His keeping? And were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life of my brother should be added to mine?" Thus, under the cold snow of the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of it a fair snow-man.
The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion; and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves that he would soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Füchslein; but he wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow weather another year, 't is more than I expect," said Hans.
This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a Hanoverian Post-boy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus, whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone bore a grudge; simply because Fixlein did not write himself Füchslein, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage; and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train: "He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind him of it." The mild, compliant Quintus never noticed this large wasp-poison-bag in the Subrector, but took it for a honey-bag; nay, by his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The Quintus, in his simplicity, took Füchslein's contempt for envy of his pedagogic talents.
A Catherinenhof, an Annenliof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof, and Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with (if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas eve he walks about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for nothing but—daylight; joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like sparrows, his sleep-grains; and to-night, moreover, the registrator of his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which, accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
On Christmas morn he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish inflation about his Quintusship. "The Quintus-post," said he to himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at present, I had more reason." To-day he eat, as on all Sundays and holidays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To this man Fixlein was, what common people are always, but polished, philosophical, and sentimental people very seldom are,—thankful; a man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person. Meister Steinberger, in the character of storemaster, had introduced into the wirecage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread, and Sauerkraut. Money indeed was never to be wrung from him; it is well known that he often sent the best calf-skins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.—On Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the arm-chair, silver implements, and a wine-soup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a Flescher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you are made that, it is well.—Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all instalment-dues to his Ward, at an interest of four and a half per cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement to the Quintusship; of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on the day of payment, the Quintus always got some abatement; being wont every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in arithmetic, writing, and geography. Steinberger with justice required of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns where he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready, so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility. The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and assignee of her heart. The old Flescher—simply because his wife was dead—had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long ago observed—what the Quintus never did—that she had a mind for the said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their joys; to-day, at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become unusually red.
"When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you. Ward, did you never cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get her; but we have done with one another; for a learned man needs quite another sort of thing."
"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein, (for this post Steinberger filled in the Provincial Militia,) "such a match were far too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,—at the same time taking down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and suspend his slain calves; "Stop!—Hark, dost wish the present Herr Conrector here for thy husband? "
"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flescher; "with this crook thy father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed the keenlier.
Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers. Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with their debts—this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.
As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life, embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for the reader,—I must now travel on with the stream, his history to Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his thirty-third year.
From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector. The new chair of office was a Sunaltar, on which, from his Quintus-ashes, a young Phoenix combined itself together. Great changes—in offices, marriages, travels—make us younger; we always date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has never been aught else except a—crown-prince.
FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
Cantata-Sunday.—Two Testaments.—Pontac; Blood; Love.
HE spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand, this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by blossoms than by snow.
In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic thrice.
Men are apt to postpone their last will as long as their better one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future, where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants, and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his protégé had been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all away,—life, testament, and hopes.
When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home. Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft tones of plaintiveness; nor the Borrow of the Philosopher, who, through one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother, whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any more!"—And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.
Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed, over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.—To the now Conrector Egidius Zebedäus was left: In the first place, a large sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and by approach nearer, to examine it; secondly, there was devised to him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived, one ducat; thirdly, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded the mother, "what the poor Fräulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand, which was just stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy, and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near door-neighbors that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell, where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do with.
The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off—without so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which lay his emotion—up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had a female predilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which, by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend; and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story above ground. Nazianzen informs us (Orat. XVI.) that the Jews, in old times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a flea would have measured it, not in Diameters of the Earth, but in Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section, he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim about, for one half-hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass; he let the mirror he where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."
As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence, his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was; but against this venia ætatis, she saw too well the authorities would have taken exception, " that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could not but be presumed that he then was."
And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called; and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the voyage of his life; Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the best lawsuits thrown to the dogs; seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled—for in the first place, there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so long as he lived, the necessary cohclusion was, that he was not yet thirty-two[18]—from such a lock might not only silk and hanging-cords, but whole drag nets, have been spun and twisted? Clients in general would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted longer. Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of Law are not to blame for this; on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of Truth, that not the finding, but the seeking of it profits men, and that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in return for the sweet labor of investigation, so is the professor of Law not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a juridical truth,—which is called pleading and practising,—and he would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can subsist as an honorable man with wife and child, let such approximation be as tedious as it likes.
The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a further commission from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which, properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good to him.
Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the world, held his short gold-roll like a
sceptre in his hand; like a basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on, and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound, and in good season.
I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that to the moneyed Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, to-day the Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his family, came in as a further aggravation. The mother, who should have known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect how stupid I felt Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not as the poet does, in the uptowering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book; and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into slumber in some latticed pew.—
And yet he thought oftener of him than last year; for joy readily melts us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel that empties its water in our eyes .… But the friendly Genius of this terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball—for, in the physical and in the moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land—has provided for the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us, namely, a quite special elixir against spasms in the soul; I declare this same Genius must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour over his slashes and bone-breakages—gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a touch of wine .… By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous vertigoes of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy, Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and Time;—liquor, as I said.
The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three groschens of post-money, and commissioned—for he had a whole cabinet of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark wth his hand—three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must have a Cantata merry-making," said he; "if it be my last day, let it be my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question is, whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fräulein. Had he lived in the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand, or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when, accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people boused up all,—he would not have spent one kreuzer more on that account. His joy was, that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man. Just people, who make much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.
The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,—with the Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun.…
I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical scene before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of Jerusalem, there were a special door—besides that of Death—standing open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her, occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the Prosaist a Psalmist; in sorrow alone have women courage to front opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in the garden.
The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair friend, to offer his thanks,—and to-night also—his Pontac. Three Pontac decanters and three wine-glasses were placed outside on the projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every time he returned from the dusky covered-way amid the flower forests, he drank a little from his glass,—and the mother sipped now and then from within through the opened window.
I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the south-west corner of the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched back into the village. In the northwest corner bloomed an acacia grove, like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood. On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil of our life's lamp where he finds it shed; to him it is the red death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the flower-bushes; her hands with her knitting-ware sunk into her bosom, her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her left arm in the real bandage of bloodletting; and with cheeks to which the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings—this day's included—had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror—not at this flower's sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance—began to unroll the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her; he was now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait on her with his ears, not with his eyes.
I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the Conrector plucked up courage to—turn, to come back, and employ the resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling, and calling to his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take her by the hand, and with some medical apology, gently pull her out of sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never dream.
However, he did awake her, by those other means.
"Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the night-air of memory is again blowing on thy naked wounds!—and yet was the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could light on, when it sank from the hanging-garden of Dreams into this lower one round thee.
She herself was little conscious,—and the Conrector not at all,—that she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial body, namely, towards Fixlein. She resembled an Italian flower, that contains cunningly concealed within it a new-year's gift, which the receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards her. She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials, upon altars, to be worshipped. He could very suitably preface his invitation to the Pontac festival with a long acknowledijraent of thanks for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her, or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm. One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as a sable Abbé by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He, however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down from another street.
These things he cannot help. But to-night he had scarcely, with his fair, faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some superstitious dread of water-spirits had lately poured the pure blood of her left arm,—when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fräulein. I aver that at the banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth, while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper ball of the steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious, modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart, and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away. A candle stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions; on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in reflection, the face of Thiennette.
Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew, and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a shorter grating of shadow. The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging more and more continuous in the sable of night. The warm vapor of the wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.
Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in the night. Fixlein now led the Fräulein in his arm without scruple. By reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the provender of Love; the fingers are electric discharges of a fire sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two tear-drops, one in another's, one in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and, perhaps, thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the Suffering sex!
And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou good sex, am representing in little figures the cuts and scars of thy spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new ones.…
Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had already told his mother, as she now told him. In the last two nights of the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once after midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips. Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,—and only rounded her lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own, wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen and tearful, she pressed her warm lips on the colder,—and she was silent like her that was to speak no more,—and she embraced alone and was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again; she sank down on the stiffened lips,—but this had been no signal, for the lips of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night, did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou, like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a sunny day; without parents art thou, without brother, without friend; here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou, left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and she is so good from the very heart,—Me she has made happy,—Ah, had I the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a trial." … Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with sable,—and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in an hour and a half be transformed into the boldest, and then continues so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in passing, that this was stupid; the torn vine is full of water-veins as well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt only into tears.
If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.—One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors—that is to say, in the long run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits—make men at once pious, soft, and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, is forever a youth; and is, what other men are only once, namely, in love,—or only after Pontac, namely, intoxicated,—all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the morning, now became one at night; wine made him pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be kept moist.
He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was playing: over the green hills ran the white, crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up; and over all these vapors of life hung motionless and flaming the thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning galaxy.…
It now struck eleven. … Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dread Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral piles, was mounting up.
The whole future Crucifixion of his friend lay prickly and bethorned before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her foot,—she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."
Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook this speech for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm to-night for the first time pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay; the only living mortal's arm by which Joy, Love, and the Earth were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the Whispering-gallery,[19] where the faintest breath bodies itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our poor, powerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not; he was over-powered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I will give you all; fortune, life, and all that I have, my heart and my hand."
She was about to answer, but, casting a side glance, she cried, with a shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round, and perceived the white muslin sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage was put on: he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one does with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her afflicted life was hurrying. —
When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude.—The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible softness; and the heart lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed, as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get back their tones. Before such a magic form, before such a pure, heavenly love, her sympathizing friend was melted between the flames of joy and grief; and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, on the pale, angelic face, the lips of which he timidly pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into one. now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last rapture of existence. … Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love; for in thy love thou thoughtest to die. …
However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was now for long years passed over.—Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their betrothment, from its dust broken by white acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was new, light, and young. The sky stood full of glittering dew-drops from the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.—The Moon, with her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden, and was hanging above in a starless blue, as if she had consumed the nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a Christ's-face smiling in love of man.—
Under this light they looked at one another for the first time after the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still standing written on their faces.…
Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in Paradise!
SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-Impost.—One of the most important of Petitions.
HE finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!—With the inflammatory, tickling, eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling that he had now got the introductory programme of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living, prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;—with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long; he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured—as pilgrims measure with the length of their pilgrimage, not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters—the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm, billowy life; he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother down-stairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple grass, and that yesterday she had not told him, merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him—especially as he was sober now—when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.
The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four, he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment), into the cooling dawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes—not indeed to meet him, but still—into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying- water of the dew, which, as it imparts color to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook"). And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his last night's happiness, dips down into the West, hke an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.
The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a true entire Potosi of delights.
In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees and thanked God—not so much for his heritage and bride as—for his life; for he had gone away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back; and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will, than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth; one loves the Earth and those that are on it with a new love. The Conrector could have found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who, in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a Quintaner.…
His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty florins cash in ducats, on the table; "At last I repay you," said Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."
"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said, payable at three months' mutual notice. How could a man like me go on, else? However, I will change you the gold-pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself a better hat, and whole shoes. "If you like," added he, "to get a calf-skin and half a dozen hare-skins dressed, they are lying up-stairs." I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appeared before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots, or in suitable apparel. In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.
But now came two most peculiarly important papers—at bottom only one, the petition for the Hukelum parsonship—to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.… It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.
In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open; for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up his post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he—owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work, which I cannot explain till after what follows.
It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well had he—for man is a fool from the very foundation of him—had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader; but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into school-rooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson have nothing to pay,—even in Baireuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such that a Quartus,—a Quartus, do I say,—a Tertius—a Tertius, do I say,—a Conrector,—at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than:—
| Fl. rhen. | Kr. rhen. | ||
| 30 | 49 | For taking the oaths at the Consistorium. | |
| 4 | 0 | To the Syndic for the Presentation. | |
| 2 | 0 | To the then Burgermeister. | |
| 45 | 7½ | For the Government-sanction. | |
| Total, | 81 fl. | 56½ kr. |
If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus, &c., come cheaper from the press than even a Conrector. Now, it is clear, that in this case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first year, he gets an overplus beyond this dockmoney of his office. A schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly income in the highest class. Another thing in his favor is, that our institutions do not—as those of Athens did—prohibit people from entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year, under the title of Annates, or First-Fruits; and accordingly he, in all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two thirds of their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must naturally have an eye to vacancies.
It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of Mentz, when I confess, that, in Schmausen's Corp. jur. pub. Germ., I have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of the 6th January, 1659, and there investigated how much this same Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into a Poet Laureate, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues, to pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by and ex officio. The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1,000 florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the entry-moneys of their school-rooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase the venia ætatis with 200 hard florins; while, with the half sum, he might have become a schoolmaster, and here age would have come of its own accord. And a thousand such things! They prove, however, that matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.
The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks a Town-syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted for mere dread of digressiveness.
The Syndic—a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family—gave me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair to the bench and the ladder on which people are laid when about to be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30 reichsthalers;[20] if he annually purchase manufactured goods, according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual, namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundred-weights of victual than these assume, namely, 10; in short, if he live like a substantial wood-cutter, then the Devil must be in it if he cannot yearly lay by so much net profit as shall, in the long run, pay the interest of his entry debts."
The Syndic must have failed to convince me at that time, since I afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[21] "Illustrious sir, you know not, but I do,—not a player in your Theatre would act the Schoolmaster in Engel's Prodigal Son, three nights running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for acting it all the days of the year. In Prussia, invalids are made Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made invalids." .…
But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of his Crown-debts; but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also, and the grove of betrothment,—this was an open gate into a New Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed. For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby scarcely the purchase-money of a—purse was to be come at; in this way he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial torch than for his bridal one.
For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered states, as little permitted to marry as the soldiery. In Conringius de Antiquitatibus Academicis, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now cloisters, and consequently we endeavor to maintain in our teachers at least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows.
The Vow of Obedience might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors;- but the second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to, that no man who has made it needs any further testimonium paupertatis;—and now let this man, if he likes, lay hold of a matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer! .…
I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the annexed wedding-mansion; for they see clearly enough, that directly thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came from such a repository.
Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking; it submitted to the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the parish; his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service; therefore he prayed," &c.
2. "The here documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreuzers, and one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten testament secured him, he himself could clear, in case he obtained the living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &;c.
Voluntary Note hy me. It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather, whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader, blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine. Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons by whom not indeed the church and churchyard—though these things are articles of commerce in England—so much as the true management of them, had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know from Lange,[22] that the Church must support its patron, when he has nothing to live upon; and might not a nobleman, before he actually began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer? —
3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fräulein von Thiennette, and given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed the said Fräulein, were he once provided for," &c.
Voluntary Note by me. I hold this ground to be the strongest in the whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten, and full of millepedes; she was his Œconoma, his Castle-Stewardess, and Legatess a Latere for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth..…
4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."
My Voluntary Note. The dog then, it seems, to which the nobleman has hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name a second time from him!—But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church, how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies deeper; not the contracted situation, but the contracted eye, not a favorite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic,—a soul that cannot measure and separate the concentric circles of human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all—— In short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.
The Conrector wrote out his Petition splendidly in five propitious evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some months, if Scioppius's word is to be taken; still less so long as another scholar at a Latin epistle, who—truly we have nothing but Morhof's word for it—hatched it during four whole months; inserting his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases, accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more thorough-going genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after life.
Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel, if he get the parsonage; can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as, according to Moser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they made in the forenoon (in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),—so the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly happen, as at those hours they are—sleeping.
SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
Sermon.— School-Exhibition.— Splendid Mistake.
HE Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreuzers, one halfpenny Frankish; but no answer; the dog remained without name, his master without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidate breeding-pond, and thrown him into the feeding-pond of the Hukelum parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty dyers', button-makers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess, or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the Peerage, while still a fœtus, may with more propriety be likened to the spinner, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's womb. —
But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him, that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still 35 florins left to himself, as allodium and pocket-money, wherewith he might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means; every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random, two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too, when, on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these funds from his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy, having offered it as bounty-money and luckpenny to the patron, this false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church door, would certainly have vexed him; but now, if he had missed the knocker, he had the luck-penny again, and could be merry.
I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native village, with a brief transitory notice.
In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing; and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such a thing would please myself as much as another…… Do not ask me! In my opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday, before all the peasants, who had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; further, before his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her satin muff; further, before his Lordship, whom he can positively command to be blessed; and finally before his muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same lips can both kiss and preach; in my opinion, I say, when a man effects all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would paint his situation, that he—hold his jaw; and of the reader who would sympathize with it, that he open his, and preach himself.——
But what I must ex officio depict, is the day to which this Sunday was but the prelude, the vigil, and the whet; I mean the prelude, the vigil, and the whet to the Martini Actus, or Martinmas Exhibition of his school. On Sunday was the sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the universe.
I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or the opera seria of Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who have been at schools, and who know how the School-Drama of an Actus and the stage-manager, and the playbill (the programme) thereof are to be estimated, still without overrating their importance.
Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the Martini Actus, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording, the Conrector's Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, whether, in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectious barbarisms? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who, not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them, but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also our Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question, whether the Romans, when they taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than in this same. Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what follows, in his own words:—
"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation, the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children, grandchildren, and children's children, down to our own times, of this great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured, with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in 1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject; however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to, on the 14th of November, from the mouths of six well-conditioned perorators. In the first place, shall
"Gottlieb Spiesglass, a Flachsenfinger, endeavor to show, in a Latin oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the Luther family. After him strives
"Friedrich Christian Krabbler, from Hukelum, in German prose, to appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will
"Daniel Lorenz Stenzinger deliver, in Latin verse, an account of Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give opportunity to
"Nikol Tobias Pfizman to come forward in French, and recount the most important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years, university-life, and riper age. And now, when
"Andreas Eintarm shall have endeavored, in German verse, to apologize for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther, will
"Justus Strobel, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons of the Flachsenfingen School, and then further bring forward those portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know absolutely nothing, they being spared, Deo volente, for the speakers of the next Martini Actus."
The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could not be present at the great school-festival, especially ladies, made their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but, on the other hand, I am equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with his triumphal chariot and six—to call the six brethren-speakers coach-horses—next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor gentleman. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy to-day's Ovation, which is leading on to-morrow's Triumph; on thy dissolving countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday's clothes humbly to place herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen, and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things and understand them too;—or the son, who, like some of the heroes of Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the late Burchardt Grossmann, who, under the initial letters of the stanzas in his song "Brich an, du liebe Morgenröthe," inserted the letters of his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herb-woman for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making herself one twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man as wise—though indeed as very clever and pedantic—who can fret his gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World (so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe, the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree, and Life-tree, and the dew-drops as the Ocean. "We poor day-moths, evening-moths, and night-moths fall universally into the same error, only on different leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important, airs with which the schoolmaster issues his programmes, the dramaturgist his playbills, the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,—does it, if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his own similar folly; and laughs, in regard to his neighbor, at nothing but mankind and himself.
The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to Hukelum, to give the Fräulein Thiennette at least some tidings of -this glorious business. —
And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus itself as shall be single of its kind.
But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.——
It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum Presentation for the Subrector Füchslein in his pocket. To the last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage; but he had distinguished ill betwixt Sub and Conrector; and had besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for he thought, "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our Fräulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats already?" That his Lordship could pass over his own godson never entered the man's head.
Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the Parson Fixlein of Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own; and finding moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but only of a Schul-unterbefehlshaber, or School-undergovernor (instead of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error.
Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector—we two, the reader and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful salutations—on his gratefully-streaming eyes—on his full hands so laden with bounty—on the present of two ducats, which he drops into the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister), or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over, though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning, shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined, on the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus, though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to call this evening, in passing, at his mother's, and give her a lecture for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive to-day.
The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical—and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters, and with colored ink; as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except ornamental letters and when newly washed;[23]—and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus—for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling—he was now flying as on a huge see-saw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.
But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadock Lawyer. Fixlein instead of Füchslein[24] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will the former had occurred so often. Von, this triumphal arch, he durst not set up before Füchslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Füchslein as a mushroom, who had no right to vons and titles of nobility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[25] whim of Germanizing everything, minding little though when Germanized it should cease to be intelligible;—as if a word needed any better act of naturalization than that which universal unintelligibility imparts to it. In itself it is the same—the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed—whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-grass, in the pavement of the Roman Forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that Tagefarth (Day-turn) meant Term, and that Appealing was Berufen (Becalling). On this principle, he dressed the word Subrector in the new livery of School-undergovernor. And this version further converted the Schoolmaster into Parson; to such a degree does our civic fortune—not our personal well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources—grow merely on the drift-mould of accidents, connections, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what! —
By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the Acts, or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's German or un-German Law-practice) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hun-
garian,—are now, if we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion, I can point to whole lines of German language to be found in these Imperial-Court-Confessions. However, I will not believe that the Jurist is endeavoring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language, by means of which, like the Roman Eagle, or later, like the Roman Fish-heron (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his talons.——
Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony; who cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pygmy Ciceros will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit. "I should not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there could be anything grander, I mean a parson." Man, behind his everlasting blind, which he only colors differently, and makes no thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and on the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.
The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster and Master Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen shag. During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Füchslein cast several gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not once look at him. Hans would have staked his head, that, after the Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the sextuple cockerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say, had perorated, the scholastic cocker, over whom a higher banner was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship, and the lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly, announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was, the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck chapel of ease."
This little address, to appearance, wellnigh blew up the then Subrector Hans von Füchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled color, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow, and vomissement de la reine.
The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his shag, and hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The Dickens!—Parson?"——
The Subrector dashed by like a comet before the lackey; ordered him to call and take a letter for his master; strode home, and prepared for his patron, who at Schadeck was waiting for a long thanksgiving psalm, a short satirical epistle, as nervous as haste would permit, and mingled a few nicknames and verbal injuries along with it.
The courier handed in to his master Fixlein's song of gratitude and Füchslein's invectives with the same hand. The dragoon Rittmeister, incensed at the ill-mannered churl, and bound to his word, which Fixlein had publicly announced in his Actus, forthwith wrote back to the new Parson an acceptance and ratification; and Fixlein is and remains, to the joy of us all, incontestible ordained parson of Hukelum.
His disappointed rival has still this consolation, that he holds a seat in the wasp-nest of the Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek.[26] Should the Parson ever chrysalize himself into an author, the watch-wasp may then buzz out, and dart its sting into the chrysalis, and put its own brood in the room of the murdered butterfly. As the Subrector everywhere went about, and threatened in plain terms that he would review his colleague, let not the public be surpised that Fixlein's Errata, and his Masoretic Exercitationes, are to this hour withheld from it.
In spring, the widowed church receives her new husband; and how it will be, when Fixlein, under a canopy of flower-trees, takes the Sponsa Christi in one hand, and his own Sponsa in the other,—this without an Eighth Letter-Box, which, in the present case, may be a true jewel-box and rainbow-key,[27] can no mortal figure, except the Sponsus himself.
EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
Instalment in the Parsonage.
N the 15th of April, 1793, the reader may observe, far down in the hollow, three baggage-wagons groaning along. These baggage-wagons are transporting the house-gear of the new Parson to Hukelum; the proprietor himself, with a little escort of his parishioners, is marching at their side, that of his china sets and household furniture there may be nothing broken in the eighteenth century, as the whole came down to him unbroken from the seventeenth. Fixlein hears the School-bell ringing behind him; but this chime now sings to him, like a curfew, the songs of future rest; he is now escaped from the Death-valley of the Gymnasium, and admitted into the abodes of the Blessed. Here dwells no envy, no colleague, no Subrector; here, in the heavenly country, no man works in the New Universal German Library; here in the heavenly Hukelumic Jerusalem, they do nothing but sing praises in the church; and here the Perfected requires no more increase of knowledge..… Here, too, one needs not sorrow that Sunday and Saint's day so often fall together into one.
Truth to tell, the parson goes too far; but it was his way from of old never to paint out the whole and half shadows of a situation till he was got into a new one; the beauties of which he could then enhance by contrast with the former. For it requires little reflection to discover that the torments of a Schoolmaster are nothing so extraordinary; but, on the contrary, as in the Gymnasium, he mounts from one degree to another, not very dissimilar to the common torments of Hell, which, in spite of their eternity, grow weaker from century to century. Moreover, since, according to the saying of a Frenchman, deux afflictions mises ensemble peuvent devener une consolation, a man gets afflictions enow in a school to console him; seeing out of eight combined afflictions—reckon only one for every teacher—certainly more comfort is to be extracted than out of two. The only pity is, that school-people will never act towards each other as court-people do: none but polished men and polished glasses will readily cohere. In addition to all this, in schools—and in offices generally—one is always recompensed; for, as in the second life a greater virtue is the recompense of an earthly one, so, in the Schoolmaster's case, his merits are always rewarded by more opportunities for new merits; and often enough he is not dismissed from his post at all.—
Eight Gymnasiasts are trotting about in the Parsonage, setting up, nailing to, hauling in. I think, as a scholar of Plutarch, I am right to introduce such seeming minutiæ. A man whom grown-up people love, children love still more. The whole school had smiled on the smiling Fixlein, and liked him in their hearts, because he did not thunder, but sport with them; because he said Sie (They), to the Secundaners, and the Subrector said Ihr (Ye); because his uprearing forefinger was his only sceptre and baculus; because in the Secunda he had interchanged Latin epistles with his scholars; and in the Quinta had taught not with Napier's Rods (or rods of a sharper description), but with sticks of barley-sugar.
To-day his churchyard appeared to him so solemn and festive, that he wondered (though it was Monday) why his parishioners were not in their holiday, but merely in their week-day drapery. Under the door of the Parsonage stood a weeping woman; for she was too happy, and he was her—son. Yet the mother, in the height of her emotion, contrives quite readily to call upon the carriers, while disloading, not to twist off the four corner globes from the old Frankish chest of drawers. Her son now appeared to her as venerable as if he had sat for one of the copperplates in her pictured Bible; and that simply because he had cast off his pedagogue hair-cue, as the ripening tadpole does its tail; and was now standing in a clerical periwig before her; he was now a Comet, soaring away from the profane Earth, and had accordingly changed from a stella caudata into a stella crinita.
His bride also had, on former days, given sedulous assistance in this new improved edition of his house, and labored faithfully among the other furnishers and furbishers. But to-day she kept aloof; for she was too good to forget the maiden in the bride. Love, like men, dies oftener of excess than of hunger; it lives on love, but it resembles those Alpine flowers which feed themselves by suction from the wet clouds, and die if you besprinkle them.
At length the Parson is settled, and of course he must—for I know my fair readers, who are bent on it as if they were bridemaids—without delay get married. But he may not; before Ascension-day there can nothing be done, and till then are full four weeks and a half. The matter was this. He wished in the first place to have the murder-Sunday, the Cantata, behind him; not indeed because he doubted of his earthly continuance, but because he would not (even for the bride's sake) that the slightest apprehension should mingle with these weeks of glory.
The main reason was, he did not wish to marry till he were betrothed; which latter ceremony was appointed, with the Introduction Sermon, to take place next Sunday. It is the Cantata-Sunday. Let not the reader afflict himself with fears. Indeed, I should not have molested an enlightened century with this Sunday-Wauwau at all, were it not that I delineate with such extreme fidelity. Fixlein himself—especially as the Quartermaster asked him if he was a baby—at last grew so sensible that he saw the folly of it; nay, he went so far that he committed a greater folly. For as dreaming that you die signifies, according to the exegetic rule of false, nothing else than long life and welfare, so did Fixlein easily infer that his death-imagination was just such a lucky dream; the rather as it was precisely on this Cantata-Sunday that Fortune had turned up her cornucopia over him, and at once showered down out of it a bride, a presentation, and a roll of ducats. Thus can Superstition imp its wings, let Chance favor it or not.
A Secretary of State, a Peace-Treaty writer, a Notary, any such incarcerated Slave of the Desk, feels excellently well how far he is beneath a Parson composing his inaugural sermon. The latter (do but look at my Fixlein) lays himself heartily over the paper,—injects the venous system of his sermon-preparation with colored ink,—has a Text-Concordance on the right side, and a Song-Concordance on the left; is there digging out a marrowy sentence, here clipping off a song-blossom, with both to garnish his homiletic pastry;—sketches out the finest plan of operations, not, like a man of the world, to subdue the heart of one woman, but the hearts of all women that hear him, and of their husbands to boot; draws every peasant passing by his window into some niche of his discourse, to co-operate with the result;—and, finally, scoops out the butter of the smooth, soft hymn-book, and therewith exquisitely fattens the black broth of his sermon, which is to feed five thousand men.——
At last, in the evening, as the red sun is dazzling him at the desk, he can rise with heart free from guilt; and, amid twittering sparrows and finches, over the cherry-trees encircling the parsonage, look toward the west, till there is nothing more in the sky but a faint gleam among the clouds. And then when Fixlein, amid the tolling of the evening prayer-bell, slowly descends the stair to his cooking mother, there must be some miracle in the case, if for him whatever has been done or baked, or served up in the lower regions, is not right and good. … A bound, after supper, into the Castle; a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness to a bride without falseness; and then under the coverlet, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but Paradise, a sermon, and evening prayer. … I swear, with this I will satisfy a Mythic God, who has left his Heaven, and is seeking a new one among us here below!
Can a mortal, can a Me in the wet clay of Earth, which Death will soon dry into dust, ask more in one week than Fixlein is gathering into his heart? I see not how. At least I should suppose, if such a dust-framed being, after such a twenty-thousand prize from the Lottery of Chance, could require aught more, it would at most be the twenty-one-thousand prize, namely, the inaugural discourse itself.
And this prize our Zebedäus actually drew on Sunday; he preached,—he preached with unction, he did it before the crowding, rustling press of people; before his Guardian, and before the Lord of Aufhammer, the godfather of the priest and the dog;—a flock, with whom in childhood he had driven out the Castle herds about the pasture, he was now, himself a spiritual sheep-smearer, leading out to pasture;—he was standing to the ankles among Candidates and Schoolmasters, for to-day (what none of them could) at the altar, with the nail of his finger, he might scratch a large cross in the air, baptisms and marriages not once mentioned. … I believe I should feel less scrupulous than I do to checker this sun-shiny esplanade with that thin shadow of the grave which the preacher threw over it, when, in the application, with wet, heavy eyes, he looked round over the mute, attentive church, as if in some corner of it he would seek the mouldering teacher of his youth and of this congregation, who without, under the white tombstone, the wrong-side of life, had laid away the garment of his pious spirit. And when he, himself hurried on by the internal stream, inexpressibly softened by the further recollections of his own fear of death on this day, of his life now overspread with flowers and benefits, of his entombed benefactress resting here in her narrow bed,—when he now, before the dissolving countenance of her friend, his Thiennette, overpowered, motionless, and weeping, looked down from the pulpit to the door of the Schadeck vault, and said: "Thanks, thou pious soul, for the good thou hast done to this flock and to their new teacher; and, in the fulness of time, may the dust of thy god-fearing and man-loving breast gather itself, transfigured as gold-dust, round thy reawakened heavenly heart,"—was there an eye in the audience dry? Her husband sobbed aloud, and Thiennette, her beloved, bowed her head, sinking down with inconsolable remembrances, over the front of the seat, like kindred mourners in a funeral train.
No fairer forenoon could prepare the way for an afternoon in which a man was to betroth himself forever, and to unite the exchanged rings with the Ring of Eternity. Except the bridal pair, there was none present but an ancient pair; the mother and the long Guardian. The bridegroom wrote out the marriage-contract or marriage-charter with his own hand; hereby making over to his bride, from this day, his whole movable property (not, as you may suppose, his pocket-library, but his whole library; whereas, in the Middle Ages, the daughter of a noble was glad to get one or two books for marriage-portion);—in return for which, she liberally enough contributed—a whole nuptial coach or car, laden as follows: with nine pounds of feathers, not feathers for the cap such as we carry, but of the lighter sort such as carry us;—with a sumptuous dozen of godchild-plates and god-child-spoons (gifts from Schadeck), together with a fish-knife;—of silk, not only stockings (though even King Henry II. of France could dress no more than his legs in silk), but whole gowns;—with jewels and other furnishings of smaller value. Good Thiennette! in the chariot of thy spirit lies the true dowry; namely, thy noble, soft, modest heart, the morning-gift of Nature!
The Parson—who, not from mistrust, but from "the uncertainty of life," could have wished for a notary's seal on everything; to whom no security but a hypothecary one appeared sufficient; and who, in the depositing of every barleycorn, required quittances and contracts—had now, when the marriage-charter was completed, a lighter heart; and through the whole evening the good man ceased not to thank his bride for what she had given him. To me, however, a marriage-contract were a thing as painful and repulsive,—I confess it candidly, though you should in consequence upbraid me with my great youth,—as if I had to take my love-letter to a Notary Imperial, and make him docket and countersign it before it could be sent. Heavens! to see the light flower of Love, whose perfume acts not on the balance, so laid like tulip-bulbs on the hay-beam of Law; two hearts on the cold councillor and flesh-beam of relatives and Advocates, who are heaping on the scales nothing but houses, fields, and tin,—this, to the interested party, may be as delightful as, to the intoxicated suckling and nursling of the Muses and Philosophy, it is to carry the evening and morning sacrifices he has offered up to his goddess into the book-shop, and there to change his devotions into money, and sell them by weight and measure.— —
From Cantata-Sunday to Ascension, that is, to marriage-day, are one and a half weeks—or one and a half blissful eternities. If it is pleasant that nights or winter separate the days and seasons of joy to a comfortable distance; if, for example, it is pleasant that birthday, Saint's-day, betrothment, marriage, and baptismal day, do not all occur on the same day (for with very few do those festivities, like Holiday and Apostle's day, commerge), — then is it still more pleasant to make the interval, the flower-border, between betrothment and marriage, of an extraordinary breadth. Before the marriage-day are the true honey-weeks; then come the wax-weeks; then the honey-vinegar-weeks.
In the Ninth Letter-Box our Parson celebrates his wedding; and here, in the Eighth, I shall just briefly skim over his way and manner of existence till then; an existence, as might have been expected, celestial enough. To few is it allotted, as it was to him, to have at once such wings and such flowers (to fly over) before his nuptials; to few is it allotted, I imagine, to purchase flour and poultry on the same day, as Fixlein did;—to stuff the wedding-turkey with hangman-meals;—to go every night into the stall, and see whether the wedding-pig, which his Guardian had given him by way of marriage-present, is still standing and eating;—to spy out for his future wife the flax-magazines and clothes-press-niches in the house;—to lay in new wood-stores in the prospect of winter;—to obtain from the Consistorium directly, and for little smart-money, their Bull of Dispensation, their remission of the threefold proclamation of banns;—to live not in a city, where you must send to every fool (because you are one yourself), and disclose to him that you are going to be married; but in a little angular hamlet, where you have no one to tell aught, but simply the Schoolmaster that he is to ring a little later, and put a knee-cushion before the altar.——
O, if the Ritter Michaelis maintains that Paradise was little, because otherwise the people would not have found each other,—a hamlet and its joys are little and narrow, so that some shadow of Eden may still linger on our Ball.— —
I have not even hinted that, the day before the wedding, the Regiments-Quartermaster came uncalled, and killed the pig, and made puddings gratis, such as were never eaten at any Court.
And besides, dear Fixlein, on this soft, rich oil of joy there was also floating gratis a vernal sun,—and red twilights,—and flower-garlands,—and a bursting halfworld of buds!.…
How didst thou behave thee in these hot whirlpools of pleasure?—Thou movedst thy Fishtail (Reason), and therewith describedst for thyself a rectilineal course through the billows. For even half as much would have hurried another Parson from his study; but the very crowning felicity of ours was, that he stood as if rooted to the boundary-hill of Moderation, and from thence looked down on what thousands flout away. Sitting opposite the Castle-windows, he was still in a condition to reckon up that Amen occurs in the Bible one hundred and thirty times. Nay, to his old learned laboratory he now appended a new chemical stove; he purposed writing to Nürnberg and Baireuth, and there offering his pen to the Brothers Senft, not only for composing practical Receipts at the end of their Almanacs, but also for separate Essays in front under the copperplate title of each Month, because he had a thought of making some reformatory cuts at the common people's mental habitudes … And now, when in the capacity of Parson he had less to do, and could add to the holy resting-day of the congregation six literary creating-days, he determined (even in these Carnival weeks) to strike his plough into the hitherto quite fallow History of Hukelum, and soon to follow the plough with his drill.…
Thus roll his minutes, on golden wheels-of-fortune, over the twelve days, which form the glancing star-paved road to the third heaven of the thirteenth, that is, to the
NINTH LETTER-BOX,
Or to the Marriage.
SE, fair Ascension and Marriage day, and gladden readers also! Adorn thyself with the fairest jewel, with the bride, whose soul is as pure and glittering as its vesture; like pearl and pearl-muscle, the one, as the other, lustrous and ornamental! And so over the espalier, whose fruit-hedge has hitherto divided our darling from his Eden, every reader now presses after him! —
On the 9th of May, 1793, about three in the morning, there came a sharp peal of trumpets, like a light-beam, through the dim-red May-dawn; two twisted horns, with a straight trumpet between them, like a note of admiration between interrogation-points, were clanging from a house in which only a parishioner (not the Parson) dwelt and blew; for this parishioner had last night been celebrating the same ceremony which the pastor had this day before him. The joyful tallyho raised our Parson from his broad bed (and the Shock from beneath it, who some weeks ago had been exiled from the white, sleek coverlet), and this so early, that in the portraying tester, where on every former morning he had observed his ruddy visage, and his white bedclothes, all was at present dim and crayoned.
I confess, the new-painted room, and a gleam of dawn on the wall, made it so light, that he could see his knee-buckles glancing on the chair. He then softly awakened his mother (the other guests were to lie for hours in the sheets), and she had the city cook-maid to awaken, who, like several other articles of wedding-furniture, had been borrowed for a day or two from Flachsenfingen. At two doors he knocked in vain, and without answer; for all were already down at the hearth, cooking, blowing, and arranging.
How softly does the Spring day gradually fold back its nun-veil, and the Earth grow bright, as if it were the morning of a Resurrection!—The quicksilver-pillar of the barometer, the guiding Fire-pillar of the weather-prophet, rests firmly on Fixlein's Ark of the Covenant. The Sun raises himself, pure and cool, into the morningblue, instead of into the morning-red. Swallows, instead of clouds, shoot skimming through the melodious air … O, the good Genius of Fair Weather, who deserves many temples and festivals (because without him no festival could be held), lifted an ethereal, azure Day, as it were, from the well-clear atmosphere of the Moon, and sent it down, on blue butterfly-wings,—as if it were a blue Monday,—glittering below the Sun, in the zigzag of joyful, quivering descent, upon the narrow spot of Earth, which our heated fancies are now viewing .… And on this balmy, vernal spot stand, amid flowers, over which the trees are shaking blossoms instead of leaves, a bride and a bridegroom..… Happy Fixlein! how shall I paint thee without deepening the sighs of longing in the fairest souls?—
But soft! we will not drink the magic cup of Fancy to the bottom at six in the morning; but keep sober till towards night!
At the sound of the morning prayer-bell, the bridegroom, for the din of preparation was disturbing his quiet orison, went out into the churchyard, which (as in many other places), together with the church, lay round his mansion like a court. Here on the moist green, over whose closed flowers the churchyard wall was still spreading broad shadows, did his spirit cool itself from the warm dreams of Earth; here, where the white flat gravestone of his Teacher lay before him like the fallen-in door on the Janus's-temple of Life, or like the windward side of the narrow house, turned towards the tempests of the world; here, where the little shrunk metallic door on the grated cross of his father uttered to him the inscriptions of death, and the year when his parent departed, and all the admonitions and mementos, graven on the lead;—there, I say, his mood grew softer and more solemn; and he now lifted up by heart his morning prayer, which usually he read; and entreated God to bless him in his office, and to spare his mother's life, and to look with favor and acceptance on the purpose of to-day. Then over the graves he walked into his fenceless little angular flower-garden; and here, composed and confident in the Divine keeping, he pressed the stalks of his tulips deeper into the mellow earth.
But on returning to the house, he was met on all hands by the bell-ringing and the Janizary-music of wedding-gladness;—the marriage-guests had all thrown off their nightcaps, and were drinking diligently;—there was a clattering, a cooking, a frizzling;—tea-services, coffee-services, and warm beer-services, were advancing in succession; and plates full of bride-cakes were going round like potters' frames or cistern-wheels.—The Schoolmaster, with three young lads, was heard rehearsing from his own house an Arioso, with which, so soon as they were perfect, he purposed to surprise his clerical superior.—But now rushed all the arms of the foaming joy-streams into one, when the sky-queen besprinkled with blossoms, the bride, descended upon Earth in her timid joy, full of quivering, humble love;—when the bells began;—when the procession-column set forth with the whole village round and before it;—when the organ, the congregation, the officiating priest, and the sparrows on the trees of the church-window, struck louder and louder their rolling peals on the drum of the jubilee-festival. … The heart of the singing bridegroom was like to leap from its place for joy, "that on his bridal-day it was all so respectable and grand."—Not till the marriage benediction could he pray a little.
Still worse and louder grew the business during dinner, when pastry-work and marchpane-devices were brought forward,—when glasses and slain fishes (laid under the napkins to frighten the guests) went round;—and when the guests rose, and themselves went round, and at length danced round; for they had instrumental music from the city there.
One minute handed over to the other the sugar-bowl and bottle-case of joy; the guests heard and saw less and less, and the villagers began to see and hear more and more, and towards night they penetrated like a wedge into the open door,—nay, two youths ventured even, in the middle of the parsonage-court, to mount a plank over a beam, and commence seesawing. Out of doors, the gleaming vapor of the departed Sun was encircling the Earth, the evening star was glittering over parsonage and churchyard; no one heeded it.
However, about nine o'clock,—when the marriage-guests had wellnigh forgotten the marriage-pair, and were drinking or dancing along for their own behoof; when poor mortals, in this sunshine of Fate, like fishes in the sunshine of the sky, were leaping up from their wet, cold element; and when the bridegroom, under the star of happiness and love, casting like a comet its long train of radiance over all his heaven, had in secret pressed to his joy-filled breast his bride and his mother,—then did he lock a slice of wedding-bread privily into a press, in the old superstitious belief, that this residue secured continuance of bread for the whole marriage. As he returned, with greater love for the sole partner of his life, she herself met him with his mother, to deliver him in private the bridal-nightgown and bridal-shirt, as is the ancient usage. Many a countenance grows pale in violent emotions, even of joy; Thiennette's wax-face was bleaching still whiter under the sunbeams of Happiness. O never fall, thou lily of Heaven, and may four springs instead of four seasons open and shut thy flower-bells to the sun! All the arms of his soul as he floated on the sea of joy were quivering to clasp the soft, warm heart of his beloved, to encircle it gently and fast, and draw it to his own.…
He led her from the crowded dancing-room into the cool evening. Why does the evening, does the night, put warmer love in our hearts? Is it the nightly pressure of helplessness; or is it the exalting separation from the turmoil of life; that veiling of the world, in which for the soul nothing more remains but souls;—is it therefore, that the letters in which the loved name stands written on our spirit appear, like phosphorus-writing, by night in fire, while by day in their cloudy traces they but smoke?
He walked with his bride into the Castle-garden; she hastened quickly through the castle, and past its servants'hall, where the fair flowers of her young life had been crushed broad and dry, under a long, dreary pressure; paid her soul expanded, and breathed in the free open garden, on whose flowery soil destiny had cast forth the first seeds of the blossoms which to-day were gladdening her existence. Still Eden! Green flower-checkered chiaroscuro!—The moon is sleeping under ground like a dead one; but beyond the garden the sun's red evening-clouds have fallen down like rose-leaves; and the evening-star, the brideman of the sun, hovers, like a glancing butterfly, above the rosy red, and, modest as a bride, deprives no single starlet of its light.
The wandering pair arrived at the old gardener's hut; now standing locked and dumb, with dark windows in the light garden, like a fragment of the Past surviving in the Present. Bared twigs of trees were folding, with clammy, half-formed leaves, over the thick, intertwisted tangles of the bushes.—The Spring was standing, like a conqueror, with Winter at his feet.—In the blue pond, now bloodless, a dusky evening-sky lay hollowed out, and the gushing waters were moistening the flower-beds.—The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the East, and falling down extinguished in the red sea of the West.
The wind whirred, like a night-bird, louder through the trees; and gave tones to the acacia-grove, and the tones called to the pair who had first become happy within it: "Enter, new mortal pair, and think of what is past, and of my withering and your own; and be holy as Eternity, and weep not only for joy, but for gratitude also!"—And the wet-eyed bridegroom led his wet-eyed bride under the blossoms, and laid his soul, like a flower, on her heart, and said: "Best Thiennette, I am unspeakably happy, and would say much, and cannot.—Ah, thou Dearest, we will live like angels, like children together! Surely I will do all that is good to thee; two years ago I had nothing, no nothing; ah, it is through thee, best love, that I am happy. I call thee Thou, now, thou dear good soul! "She drew him closer to her, and said, though without kissing him: "Call me Thou always, Dearest!"
And as they stept forth again from the sacred grove into the magic-dusky garden, he took off his hat; first, that he might internally thank God, and secondly, because he wished to look into this fairest evening sky.
They reached the blazing, rustling marriage-house, but their softened hearts sought stillness; and a foreign touch, as in the blossoming vine, would have disturbed the flower-nuptials of their souls. They turned rather, and winded up into the churchyard to preserve their mood. Majestic on the groves and mountains stood the Night before man's heart, and made it also great. Over the white steeple-obelisk the sky rested bluer and darker; and behind it wavered the withered summit of the May-pole with faded flag. The son noticed his father's grave, on which the wind was opening and shutting, with harsh noise, the little door of the metal cross, to let the year of his death be read on the brass plate within. An overpowering sadness seized his heart with violent streams of tears, and drove him to the sunk hillock, and he led his bride to the grave, and said: "Here sleeps he, my good father; in his thirty-second year he was carried hither to his long rest. O Thou good, dear father, couldst thou to-day but see the happiness of thy son, like my mother! But thy eyes are empty, and thy breast is full of ashes, and thou seest us not."—He was silent. The bride wept aloud; she saw the mouldering coffins of her parents open, and the two dead arise and look round for their daughter, who had stayed so long behind them, forsaken on the Earth. She fell upon his heart, and faltered: "beloved, I have neither father nor mother; do not forsake me!"
O thou who hast still a father and a mother, thank God for it, on the day when thy soul is full of joyful tears, and needs a bosom wherein to shed them.…
And with this embracing at a father's grave, let this day of joy be holily concluded.—
TENTH LETTER-BOX.
St. Thomas'-Day and Birthday.
N Author is a sort of bee-keeper for his reader-swarm; in whose behalf he separates the Flora kept for their use into different seasons, and here accelerates, and there retards, the blossoming of many a flower, that so in all chapters there be blooming.
The goddess of Love and the angel of Peace conducted our married pair on tracks running over full meadows, through the Spring; and on footpaths hidden by high corn-fields, through the Summer; and Autumn, as they advanced towards Winter, spread her marble leaves under their feet. And thus they arrived before the low, dark gate of Winter, full of life, full of love, trustful, contented, sound, and ruddy.
On St. Thomas's-day was Thiennette's birthday as well as Winter's. About a quarter past nine, just when the singing ceases in the church, we shall take a peep through the window into the interior of the parsonage. There is nothing here but the old mother, who has all day (the son having restricted her to rest, and not work) been gliding about, and brushing, and burnishing, and scouring, and wiping; every carved chair-leg, and every brass nail of the waxcloth-covered table, she has polished into brightness;—everything hangs, as with all married people who have no children, in its right place, brushes, fly-flaps, and almanacs;—the chairs are stationed by the room-police in their ancient corners;—a flax-rock, encircled with a diadem, or scarf of azure riband, is lying in the Schadeck-bed, because, though it is a half-holiday, some spinning may go on;—the narrow slips of paper, whereon heads of sermons are to be arranged, lie white beside the sermons themselves, that is, beside the octavo paper-book which holds them, for the Parson and his work-table, by reason of the cold, have migrated from the study to the sitting-room;—his large furred doublet is hanging beside his clean bridegroom-nightgown; there is nothing wanting in the room but He and She. For he had preached her with him to-night into the empty Apostle's-day church, that so her mother, without witnesses,—except the two or three thousand readers who are peeping with me through the window,—might arrange the provender-baking, and whole commissariat department of the birthday-festival, and spread out her best table-gear and victual-stores without obstruction.
The soul-curer reckoned it no sin to admonish, and exhort, and encourage, and threaten his parishioners, till he felt pretty certain that the soup must be smoking on the plates. Then he led his birthday helpmate home, and suddenly placed her before the altar of meat-offering, before a sweet title-page of bread-tart, on which her name stood baked, in true monastic characters, in tooth-letters of almonds. In the background of time and of the room, I yet conceal two—bottles of Pontac. How quickly, under the sunshine of joy, do thy cheeks grow ripe, Thiennette, when thy husband solemnly says: "This is thy birthday; and may the Lord bless thee, and watch over thee, and cause his countenance to shine on thee, and send thee, to the joy of our mother and thy husband especially, a happy, glad recovery. Amen!"—And when Thiennette perceived that it was the old mistress who had cooked and served up all this herself, she fell upon her neck, as if it had been not her husband's mother, but her own.
Emotion conquers the appetite. But Fixlein's stomach was as strong as his heart; and with him no species of movement could subdue the peristaltic. Drink is the friction-oil of the tongue, as eating is its drag. Yet, not till he had eaten and spoken much, did the pastor fill the glasses. Then indeed he drew the corksluice from the bottle, and set forth its streams. The sickly mother, of a being still hid beneath her heart, turned her eyes, in embarrassed emotion, on the old woman only; and could scarcely chide him for sending to the city wine-merchant on her account. He took a glass in each hand, for each of the two whom he loved, and handed them to his mother and his wife, and said: "To thy long, long life, Thiennette!—And your health and happiness, Mamma!—And a glad arrival to our little one, if God so bless us!" "My son," said the gardeneress, "it is to thy long life that we must drink; for it is by thee we are supported. God grant thee length of days!" added she, with stifled voice, and her eyes betrayed her tears.
I nowhere find a livelier emblem of the female sex, in all its boundless levity, than in the case where a woman is carrying the angel of Death beneath her heart, and yet in these nine months full of mortal tokens thinks of nothing more important than of who shall be the gossips, and what shall be cooked at the christening. But thou, Thiennette, hadst nobler thoughts, though these too along with them. The still hidden darling of thy heart was resting before thy eyes like a little angel sculptured on a gravestone, and pointing with its small finger to the hour when thou shouldst die; and every morning and every evening thou thoughtest of death with a certainty of which I yet knew not the reasons; and to thee it was as if the Earth were a dark mineral cave, where man's blood, like stalactitic water, drops down, and in dropping raises shapes which gleam so transiently, and so quickly fade away! And that was the cause why tears were continually trickling from thy soft eyes, and betraying all thy anxious thoughts about thy child; but thou repaidst these sad effusions of thy heart by the embrace in which, with new-awakened love, thou fellest on thy husband's neck, and saidst: "Be as it may, God's will be done, so thou and my child are left alive!—But I know well that thou, Dearest, lovest me as I do thee." … Lay thy hand, good mother, full of blessings, on the two; and thou, kind Fate, never lift thine away from them!—
It is with emotion and good wishes that I witness the kiss of two fair friends, or the embracing of two virtuous lovers; and from the fire of their altar sparks fly over to me; but what is this to our sympathetic exaltation when we see two mortals, bending under the same burden, bound to the same duties, animated to the same care for the same little darlings, fall on one another's overflowing hearts, in some fair hour? And if these, moreover, are two mortals who already wear the mourning weeds of life, I mean old age, whose hair and cheeks are now grown colorless, and eyes grown dim, and whose faces a thousand thorns have marred into images of Sorrow;—when these two clasp each other with such wearied, aged arms, and so near to the precipice of the grave, and when they say or think: "All in us is dead, but not our love—O we have lived and suffered long together, and now we will hold out our hands to Death together also, and let him carry us away together,"—does not all within us cry: O Love, thy spark is superior to Time; it burns neither in joy nor in the cheek of roses; it dies not, neither under a thousand tears nor under the snow of old age, nor under the ashes of thy—beloved. It never dies; and Thou, All-good! if there were no eternal love, there were no love at all.…
To the Parson it was easier than it is to me to pave for himself a transition from the heart to the digestive faculty. He now submitted to Thiennette (whose voice at once grew cheerful, while her eyes time after time began to sparkle) his purpose to take advantage of the frosty weather and have the winter meat slaughtered and salted. "The pig can scarcely rise," said he; and forthwith he fixed the determination of the women, further the butcher, and the day, and all et ceteras; appointing everything with a degree of punctuality, such as the war-college (when it applies the cupping-glass, the battle-sword, to the overfull system of mankind) exhibits on the previous day, in its arrangements, before it drives a province into the baiting-ring and slaughter-house.
This settled, he began to talk and feel quite joyously about the course of winter, which had commenced to-day at two-and-twenty minutes past eight in the morning; "for," said he, "new-year is close at hand; and we shall not need so much candle to-morrow night as to-night." His mother, it is true, came athwart him with the weapons of her five senses; but he fronted her with his Astronomical Tables, and proved that the lengthening of the day was no less undeniable than imperceptible. In the last place, like most official and married persons, heeding little whether his women took him or not, he informed them, in juristico-theological phrase: "That he would put off no longer, but write this very afternoon to the venerable Consistorium, in whose hands lay the jus circa sacra, for a new Ball to the church-steeple; and the rather, as he hoped before new-year's day to raise a bountiful subscription from the parish for this purpose. If God spare us till spring," added he, with peculiar cheerfulness, "and thou wert happily recovered, I might so arrange the whole that the ball should be set up at thy first church-going, dame!"
Thereupon he shifted his chair from the dinner and dessert table to the work-table; and spent the half of his afternoon over the petition for the steeple-ball. As there still remained a little space till dusk, he clapped his tackle to his new learned Opus, of which I must now afford a little glimpse. Out of doors among the snow, there stood near Hukelum an old Robber-Castle, which Fixlein, every day in Autumn, had hovered round like a revenant, with a view to gauge it, ichnographically to delineate it, to put every window-bar and every bridle-hook of it correctly on paper. He believed he was not expecting too much, if thereby—and by some drawings of the not so much vertical as horizontal walls—he hoped to impart to his "Architectural Correspondence of two Friends concerning the Hukelum Robber-Castle" that last polish and labor limæ which contents Reviewers. For towards the critical Star-chamber of the Reviewers he entertained not that contempt which some authors actually feel—or only affect, as, for instance, I. From this mouldered Robber-Louvre, there grew for him more flowers of joy than ever in all probability had grown from it of old for its owners.—To my knowledge, it is an anecdote not hitherto made public, that for all this no man but Büsching has to answer. Fixlein had, not long ago, among the rubbish of the church letter-room, stumbled on a paper wherein the Geographer had been requesting special information about the statistics of the village. Büsching, it is true, had picked up nothing,—accordingly, indeed, Hukelum, in his Geography, is still omitted altogether;—but this pestilential letter had infected Fixlein with the spring-fever of Ambition, so that his palpitating heart was no longer to be stilled or held in check, except by the assafoetida-emulsion of a review. It is with authorcraft as with love; both of them for decades long one may equally desire and forbear; but is the first spark once thrown into the powder-magazine, it burns to the end of the chapter.
Simply because winter had commenced by the Almanac, the fire must be larger than usual; for warm rooms, like large furs and bear-skin caps, were things which he loved more than you would figure. The dusk, this fair chiaroscuro of the day, this colored foreground of the night, he lengthened out as far as possible, that he might study Christmas discourses therein; and yet could his wife, without scruple, just as he was pacing up and down the room, with the sowing-sheet full of divine word-seeds hung round his shoulder,—hold up to him a spoonful of alegar, that he might try the same in his palate, and decide whether she should yet draw it off. Nay, did he not in all cases, though fonder of roe-fishes himself, order a milter to be drawn from the herring-barrel, because his good-wife liked it better? —
Here light was brought in; and as Winter was just now commencing his glass-painting on the windows, his ice flower-pieces, and his snow-foliage, our Parson felt that it was time to read something cold, which he pleasantly named his cold collation; namely, the description of some unutterably frosty land. On the present occasion, it was the winter history of the four Russian sailors on Nova Zembla. I, for my share, do often in summer, when the sultry zephyr is inflating the flower-bells, append certain charts and sketches of Italy, or the East, as additional landscapes to those among which I am sitting. And yet to-night he further took up the Weekly Chronicle of Flachsenfingen; and amid the bombshells, pestilences, famines, comets with long tails, and the roaring of all the Hell-floods of another Thirty Years' War, he could still listen with the one ear towards the kitchen, where the salad for his roast-duck was just a-cutting.
Good-night, old Fixlein! I am tired. May kind Heaven send thee, with the young year 1794, when the Earth shall again carry her people, like precious night-moths, on leaves and flowers, the new steeple-ball, and a thick, handsome—boy, to boot!
ELEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
HAVE just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought, advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit your Honor to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received into the bosom of the church."
I naturally started up, and there was—Parson Fixlein standing bodily at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those Klappersteins, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs, in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in such circumstances, who put it on.…
—I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show him how the matter stood.
Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of man—begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter, to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.—But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes!—By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it,—the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth;—and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she arises, shall be—Summer.
But to proceed! Every spring—and especially in such a spring—I imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath. From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,—every Candidatus must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,—and with his still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore. It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.
It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the Senior Capituli, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he was not yet—invested. and to-morrow this was to be done. I little thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden, that there I was to write another book.
I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling—so courteous—so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the travelling-gauze of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title: "Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.
In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[28]—and although the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret, all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to time;—but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul, in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;—and worse than either is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find stitched in with the Dog-post-days, and which had formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.
I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?—I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that Superstition[29] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of memory; at all events, one does forget a thousand things belonging to this world
The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the Good Shepherd, suited well with the ceremony) I must despatch in few words; because nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was—drinking (in the Parsonage),—music-making (in the Choir),—reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),—and preaching, by the Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented, made over, and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him. Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church which he had entered as a country parson, and all day he had not once the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts devoutly.
This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died. Nay, I do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved for the same day; the rather, as this usefulness consists entirely in two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they can pocket.
Not till towards evening did the Parson and I set acquainted. The Investiture officials and elevation pulley-men had, throughout the whole evening, been very violently—breathing. I mean thus; as these gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer, that, conversely, water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. "Wine-drinking, therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes them from that breathing through the smaller pores which Abernethy so highly recommends under the name of air-bath; and can the Gullet in their case be aught else than door-neighbor to the Windpipe, the consonant and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?—I am running astray; I meant to signify that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only that I used air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at my gossip certain speeches which betrayed devoutness. These he at first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before me.—Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which we little fire-flies shoot across with transient gleam;—I said to him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;—I said, the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the resistance of the Ether leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c., &c.
On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world is something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I, moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had got a sight of his Life in the hands of the Superintendent; and might be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-color,—then was my silk, which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me; for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of his Letter-boxes, and said, perhaps he had hereby been paving the way for me.
The main point, however, was, he hoped that his Errata, his Exercitationes, and his Letters on the Robber-Castle, if I should previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received; and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a Preface.
In short, when on Monday the other dignitaries with their nimbus of splendor had dissipated, I alone, like a precipitate, abode with him; and am still abiding, that is, from the fifth of May (the Public should take the Almanac of 1794, and keep it open beside them) to the fifteenth; to-day is Thursday, to-morrow is the sixteenth and Friday, when comes the Spinat-Kirmes, or Spinage-Wake, as they call it, and the uplifting of the steeple-ball, which I just purposed to await before I went. Now, however, I do not go so soon; for on Sunday I have to assist at the baptismal ceremony, as baptismal agent for my little future godson. Whoever pays attention to me, and keeps the Almanac open, may readily guess why the christening is put off till Sunday; for it is that memorable Cantata-Sunday, which once, for its mad, narcotic hemlock-virtues, was of importance in our History; but is now so only for the fair betrothment, which after two years we mean to celebrate with a baptism.
Truly it is not in my power—for want of colors and presses—to paint or print upon my paper the soft, balmy flower-garland of a fortnight which has here wound itself about my sickly life; but with a single day I shall attempt it. Man, I know well, cannot prognosticate either his joys or his sorrows, still less repeat them, either in living or writing.
The black hour of coffee has gold in its mouth for us and honey; here, in the morning coolness, we are all gathered; we maintain popular conversation, that so the parsoness and the gardeneress may be able to take share in it. The morning service in the church, where often the whole people[30] are sitting and singing, divides us. While the bell is sounding, I march with my writing-gear into the singing Castle-garden; and seat myself in the fresh acacia-grove, at the dewy two-legged table. Fixlein's Letter-boxes I keep by me in my pocket; and I have only to look and abstract from his what can be of use in my own.—Strange enough! so easily do we forget a thing in describing it, I really did not recollect for a moment that I am now sitting at the very grove-table of which I speak, and writing all this.—
My gossip in the mean time is also laboring for the world. His study is a sort of sacristy, and his printing-press a pulpit, wherefrom he preaches to all men; for an Author is the Town-chaplain of the Universe. A man who is making a book will scarcely hang himself; all rich lords'-sons, therefore, should labor for the press; for, in that case, when you awake too early in bed, you have always a plan, an aim, and therefore a cause before you why you should get out of it. Better off, too, is the author who collects rather than invents,—for the latter with its eating fire calcines the heart; I praise the Antiquary, the Heraldist, Note-maker, Compiler; I esteem the Title-perch (a fish called Perca-Diagramma, because of the letters on its scales), and the Printer (a chafer, called Scarabæus Typographus, which eats letters in the bark of fir),—neither of them needs any greater or fairer arena in the world than a piece of rag-paper, or any other laying apparatus than a pointed pencil, wherewith to lay his four-and-twenty letter-eggs.—In regard to the catalogue raisonné, which my gossip is now drawing up of German Errata, I have several times suggested to him, "that it were good if he extended his researches in one respect, and revised the rule by which it has been computed, that, e. g. for a hundred-weight of pica black-letter, four hundred and fifty semicolons, three hundred periods, &c., are required; and to recount, and see whether, in Political writings and Dedications, the fifty notes of admiration for a hundred-weight of pica black-letter were not far too small an allowance, and if so, what the real quantity was."
Several days he wrote nothing; but wrapped himself in the slough of his parson's-cloak; and so in his canonicals, beside the Schoolmaster, put the few A-b-c shooters which were not, like forest-shooters, absent on furlough by reason of the spring, through their platoon firing in the Hornbook. He never did more than his duty, but also never less. It brought a soft, benignant warmth over his heart, to think that he, who had once ducked under a School-inspectorship, was now one himself.
'About ten o'clock we meet from our different museums, and examine the village, especially the Biographical furniture and holy places, which I chance that morning to have had under my pen or pentagraph; because I look at them with more interest after my description than before it.
Next comes dinner.—
After the concluding grace, which is too long, we both of us set to entering the charitable subsidies and religious donations, which our parishioners have remitted to the sinking or rather rising fund of the church-box for the purchase of the new steeple-globe, into two ledgers; the one of these, with the names of the subscribers, or (in case they have subscribed for their children) with their children's names also, is to be inurned in a leaden capsule, and preserved in the steeple-ball; the other will remain below among the parish Registers. You cannot fancy what contributions the ambition of getting into the Ball brings us in; I declare, several peasants, who had given and well once already, contributed again when they had baptisms; must not little Hans be in the Ball too?
After this book-keeping by double entry, my gossip took to engraving on copper. He had been so happy as to elicit the discovery, that, from a certain stroke resembling an inverted Latin S, the capital letters of our German Chancery-hand, beautiful and intertwisted as you see them stand in Law-deeds and Letters-of-nobility, may every one of them be composed and spun out.
"Before you can count sixty," said he to me, "I take my fundamental-stroke and make you any letter out of it."
I merely inverted this fundamental-stroke, that is, gave him a German S, and counted sixty till he had it done. This line of beauty, when once it has been twisted and flourished into all the capitals, he purposes, by copperplates which he is himself engraving, to make more common for the use of Chanceries; and I may take upon me to give the Russian, the Prussian, and a few other smaller Courts, hopes of proof impressions from his hand; to under-secretaries they are indispensable.
Now comes evening; and it is time for us both, here forking about with our fruit-hooks on the literary Tree of Knowledge, at the risk of our necks, to clamber down again into the meadow-flowers and pasturages of rural joy. We wait, however, till the busy Thiennette, whom we are now to receive into our communion, has no more walks to take but the one between us. Then slowly we stept along (the sick lady was weak) through the office-houses; that is to say, through stalls and their population, and past a horrid lake of ducks, and past a little milk-pond of carps, to both of which colonies, I and the rest, like princes, gave bread, seeing we had it in view, on the Sunday after the christening, to—take them for bread for ourselves.
The sky is still growing kindlier and redder, the swallows and the blossom-trees louder, the house-shadows broader, and men more happy. The clustering blossoms of the acacia-grove hang down over our cold collation; and the ham is not stuck (which always vexes me) with flowers, but beshaded with them from a distance.…
And now the deeper evening and the nightingale conspire to soften me; and I soften in my turn the mild beings round me, especially the pale Thiennette, to whom, or to whose heart, after the apoplectic crushings of a down-pressed youth, the most violent pulses of joy are heavier than the movements of pensive sadness. And thus beautifully runs our pure transparent life along, under the blooming curtains of May; and in our modest pleasure, we look with timidity neither behind us nor before; as people who are lifting treasure gaze not round at the road they came, or the road they are going.
So pass our days. To-day, however, it was different; by this time, usually, the evening meal is over; and the Shock has got the osseous-preparation of our supper between his jaws; but to-night I am still sitting here alone in the garden, writing the Eleventh Letter-Box, and peeping out every instant over the meadows, to see if my gossip is not coming.
For he is gone to town, to bring a whole magazine of spiceries; his coat-pockets are wide. Nay, it is certain enough that oftentimes he brings home with him, simply in his coat-pocket, considerable flesh-tithes from his Guardian, at whose house he alights; though truly, intercourse with the polished world and city, and the refinement of manners thence arising—for he calls on the bookseller, on school-colleagues, and several respectable shop-keepers—does, much more than flesh-fetching, form the object of these journeys to the city. This morning he appointed me regent-head of the house, and delivered me the fasces and curule chair. I sat the whole day beside the young, pale mother; and could not but think, simply because the husband had left me there as his representative, that I liked the fair soul better. She had to take dark colors, and paint out for me the winter landscape and ice region of her sorrow-wasted youth; but often, contrary to my intention, by some simple elegiac word, I made her still eye wet; for the too full heart, which had been crushed with other than sentimental woes, overflowed at the smallest pressure. A hundred times in the recital I was on the point of saying: "O yes, it was with winter that your life began, and the course of it has resembled winter!"—Windless, cloudless day! Three more words about thee the world will still not take amiss from me!
I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the woman; and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife, during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and, in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid, not so much for good or for bad books—or old ones—or new ones—or such as he likes to read—or any sort of favorite books—but simply for books. The mother blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand, came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.
They then handed me—for when once women are in the way of a full, open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock of inquiry) to pour out the whole—a ring-case, in which he kept a Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more Chamberlains than picklocks among us?—
At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success. Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the poor press as with a dome. On the way thither, the mother told me she kept it hid from her son because the recollection of his brother would pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with its wrecks of a childlike, sportful Past, I, without saying a word, determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of the lost boy before his surviving brother. Can there be aught finer than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk, Herculanean ruins of childhood, now dug up and in the open air?
Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she, precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each others lips and hearts and love away by kisses; as in Rome, the statues of Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing, and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three; but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly dwelling."——
Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green. What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy Thiennette!—What news wilt thou bring us to-night from the town!—How will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul to-morrow!—
TWELFTH LETTER-BOX
Steeple-Ball Ascension.—The Toy-Press.
OW, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted off from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.
At a very early hour, a coach arrived, containing Messrs. Court-Guilder Zeddel and Locksmith Wächser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple, attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have already named, into the Church, and there celebrated, before innumerable hearers, a week-day prayer-service. Directly afterwards, my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and endeavored to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn transaction;—and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which they were specially recorded; observing that the book from which he had recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts, had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater (who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any of his members, A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at the same time to the steeple.
All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See, thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the then parson becomes acquainted with you all."—And now was the new steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the by-standers, at length full-laden, so to speak, and saturated, and fixed to the pulley-rope; — and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of the community ascend aloft.….
By Heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now stepped out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting Ball was not to cross.—But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the nearer the capital approached its crown,—and when the Slater clutched it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a Topstone-speech to this and all of us,—and when my gossip's eyes, in his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and the tears trickling down his priestly garment;—I believe I was the only man—as his mother was the only woman—whose souls a common grief laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand, that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal Sunday, he would be—two-and-thirty-years of age. "Oh!" thought I, while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"—
Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and changed into a rainbow!—Out of love to him, she had yearly told one falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal Sunday, to surprise him with the party-colored relics of his childhood, and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly, like fishhook-floats, and foot clogs, through to-morrow and next day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his birth-certificate,—all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapor of his present joys, would burn forth like a red death-warrant..… But besides all this, the leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it. Properly speaking, there is indeed no danger.
THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
Christening.
0-DAY is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it save an hour.—By Heaven! in right spirits were we all to-day. I believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.—In truth, one should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees, that they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a few firm Principles and twigs from the tree of Knowledge into the Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest to—write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,—to besprinkle my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air, intoxicated with soft odors, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moon-shiny brook. O, without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook, in its flickering, watery band, is carrying away, and which creeps under the little shadows of the bank as under clouds,—O, amid such forms and tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.
***
I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with regard to the public revenues—of his parish, to the number of his communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavor to transport himself into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to Fixlein, "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself" I lied not, for so it is..… But look in the Note.[31]
At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was a vast racket made; every time a conversion happens, especially of nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two Thirty Years' Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons; thus, in the Palais Royal, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a cannon.[32] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and in our walk, hastily conferred on him a private baptism; having named him Jean Paul before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels on the countenance of the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can take little interest. Jean Paul looks very sensible for his years, or rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.——
But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a month and a throne)?—And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them? —
In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ—an honor never paid to any other child in Hukelum,—and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[33] and all its storms and perils. .... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,—am I not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running over?—For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning..… All the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine..… But the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody point within it,—I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a woodpecker, in a skull And as I am doing so even now, let the describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again to-morrow..…
FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
H, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!—Ah! last night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.
Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for his new-born son Egidius?"—
This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.
But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;—and though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were his last.
At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,—and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,—and now, to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a tumult.
His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed his eyes that he might not see;—but Imagination in the gloom now blew aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions, and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a dagger, far into the air..…
Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,—and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups wafted him gently on;—and as he came nearer, the scythe and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red lips;—and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel flying hither from the starry blue;—and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut snow-white eyelids..…
The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in bliss in his clear bosom;—and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled away.——
But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and—his good wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.
The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were, arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it smites into discord the firm-set strings.
But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody rain;—he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,—is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?
But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,—would this life were but soon done!"
You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby—as is the popular belief—so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy One!—
CHAPTER LAST.
HAVE left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried, "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me, to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.
At last she said,—for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation becomes easy,—"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in the bed so, with the small-pox on thee!" And with this, from her full apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother. First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting; then the black velvet fall-hat or roller-cap; then the red and white leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves; his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole orbis pictus or fictus of Nürnberg puppets..…
The sick man recognized in a moment these projecting peaks of a spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,—these half shadows, this dusk of down-gone days,—this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to even from the grave..… And when he saw all this, he slowly turned round his head, as if he were awakening from a long, heavy dream; and his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said, fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and brother still living then?"—"They are dead lately," said the wounded mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes, and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father, and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendor and lights, and presence of the Past.
And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and fanned the panting soul,—and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;—in the far distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds—O his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt away, but only into dew-drops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into blood-drops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating, drinking, and swimming in the warm, relaxing rose-perfume of the brightest delusion..…
The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm. Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked him: "If he was cracked—what in the world he meant with his mad death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"
A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said: "Ward, are you a parson or a fool?—Have not I told you twenty times, there was a maggot in your head about this?"—
At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better..…
—In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got better.—He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read, instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his recovery was celebrated, my farewellfeast included; for I w^as to go in the afternoon.
This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and draw on the great scale.
During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except in—God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and himself
I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white Psalm-ciphers,[34] and wrote down what I was there—thinking. I was well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from this Salernic[35] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign mixtures,—I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.
"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.—Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[36] feed them.—For civic life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath human life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the same sort of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!—Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!—If the Second-pointer can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the Month-pointer will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!—Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!—Stake in no lotteries,—keep at home,—give and accept no pompous entertainments,—travel not abroad every year!—Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!—Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!—Inspect the neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!—Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"——
And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.
After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews—I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with the sediment of Time (I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the name Lavater, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there, but also in his Hand-Library;[37] and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among his curiosa.
On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal .… and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.
I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kräutermutze,[38] or Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory: "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"—Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Füchslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of the Litteraturzeitung at my side, who will gladly permit me to give an anticritique on paying the insertion-dues!"—I especially excited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely, nine."
In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."
As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.
At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew. In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflection of the former.—For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a tremulous form, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good) were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.
In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin trembling resonance of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo. At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell others to earth with it.
As I thought to myself that I would say. Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.—And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the Water-clock of falling tears, but by the Flower-clock[39] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.—
I would even now—for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses—address myself, and say: Far too soft, Jean Paul, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings?" May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!" "Be you, too, right happy and glad!" said Thiennette. "And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh—O, all that you deserve—may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"
We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves,—I remained alone behind him with the Night.
And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this up-stretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the Æolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.—The heart of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.—The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.—The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.—I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes.—Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God..…
Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the grave; I return to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah, retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"—
- ↑ So are the Vampires called.
- ↑ Fixlein stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by Einer Mustheil für Mädchen (A Jelly-course for young Ladies); and followed by Some Jus de Tablette for Men. A small portion of the Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither of the two have the smallest relation to Fixlein.—Ed.
- ↑ J. P. H., Jean Paul Hasus, Jean Paul, &c., have in succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German designation, either in writing or speech, is never Richter, but Jean Paul.—Ed.
- ↑ For understanding many little hints which occur in this Life of Fixlein, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following particulars: A German Gymnasium, in its complete state, appears to include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, Quartus, Tertius, &c., to the first or lowest. The forms, or classes, again, are arranged in an inverse order; the Primaner (boys of the Prima, or first form) being the most advanced, and taught by the Rector; the Secundaner, by the Conrector, &c.; and therefore the Quartaner by the Quintus. In many cases, it would seem, the number of Teachers is only six; but in this Flachsenfingen Gymnasium we have express evidence that there was no curtailment.—Ed.
- ↑ A university beer.
- ↑ From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be made good four-fold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of the Pope; the neighborhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not abridged by falcidia, &c., &c.
- ↑ Literary Germany, a work (I believe of no great merit) which Richter often twitches in the same style.—Ed.
- ↑ See Schmelzle's Journey, p. 289.—Ed.
- ↑ As in the State.—[V. or Von, de, of, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.—Ed.]
- ↑ In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The Bible Institution of that town have found instead of the 116,301 As, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. See Lüdeke's Beschr. des Turk. Reichs (Lüdeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).
- ↑ Paravicini Singularin de viris claris, Cent. I. 2.
- ↑ Ejusd., Cent. II. Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about the quantity of a syllable; the prize or'bet was the beard of the vanquished. Timotheus lost his.
- ↑ Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.
- ↑ In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by the third person; plural, it indicates respect; singular, command; the second person is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt. Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild Burschen (Students) many a duel (happily however, often ending like the Polemo-Middinia in one drop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of saying Du (thou) and Sie (they) in the wrong place.—Ed.
- ↑ These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equal gusto in another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit of gilt sweet-meats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c., &c., are specified with the same fidelity as here.—Ed.
- ↑ Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the Bienne Lake.
- ↑ Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in Vienna. In their very names these Vienna people show taste.
- ↑ As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year; it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the death of the testatrix, no farthing could be claimed by him; since, according to our fiction, at the making of the testament he was not even one year old.
- ↑ In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper sounds over, across a space of 143 feet.
- ↑ So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly requires in Germany.
- ↑ This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be excused by the equally singular relation wherein the Biographer stands to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold here were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title of Dog-post-days, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair, 1795, I hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.
- ↑ His Clerical Law, p. 551.
- ↑ Eichhorn's Einleitung ins A. T. (Introduction to the Old Testament), Vol. II.
- ↑ Both have the same sound. Füchslein means Foxling, Fox-whelp,—Ed.
- ↑ Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several others of that class, has really proposed, as represented in the text, to substitute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German terms of the like import. Geography, which may be Erdbeschreibung (Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a Geometer became an Earth-measurer, &c., &c. School-undergovernor, instead of Subrector, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author has elsewhere more than once eulogized for his project in similar style.—Ed.
- ↑ New Universal German Library, a reviewing periodical, in those days conducted by Nicolai, a sworn enemy to what has since been called the New School.—Ed.
- ↑ Superstition declares, that on the spot where the rainbow rises a golden key is left.
- ↑ To the Spring, namely, which begins with snow-drops, and ends with roses and pinks.
- ↑ This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also a Roman one. Cicero de Senectute.
- ↑ For, according to the Jurists, fifteen persons make a people.
- ↑ A long philosophical elucidation is indispensably requisite; which will be found in this Book, under the title, Natural Magic of the Imagination. [A part of the Jus de Tablette appended to this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.—Ed.]
- ↑ This pygmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof, proclaiming the conversion (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from Forenoon to Afternoon.—Ed.
- ↑ The Wild Hunter, Wilde, Jäger, is a popular spectre of Germany.—Ed.
- ↑ Indicating to the congregation what Psalm is to be sung.—Ed.
- ↑ Salerno was once famous for its medical science; but here, as in many other cases, we could desire the aid of Herr Reinhold with his Lexicon-Commentary.—Ed.
- ↑ This hospitable Potentate is as unknown to me as to any of my readers.—Ed.
- ↑ A little work printed in manuscript types; and seldom given by him to any but Princes. This piece of print-writing he intentionally passes off to the great as a piece of hand-writing; these persons being both more habituated and inclined to the reading of manuscript than of print.
- ↑ Thus defined by Adelung in his Lexicon: "Kraütermütze, in Medicine, a cap with various dried herbs sewed into it, and which is worn for all manner of troubles in the head."—Ed.
- ↑ Linné formed in Upsal a flower-clock, the flowers of which, by their different times of falling asleep, indicated the hours of the day.