Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or "profane"
authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors--the immortal auth.o.r.ess of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady"s husband--but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible words with the bookbinder"s wife were of more value in her eyes than all the bookbinder"s and bookmaker"s printed ones put together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of the _converse_ sort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so forth, pa.s.sing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that angels--of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one and the same point of s.p.a.ce)--expanded on her hands to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband.
Further, Siebenkaes discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart, on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from the other lodgers" rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of a verse ask the prosaic question, "What shall I warm for supper?"
and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening, apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said, "Don"t put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I"ve darned it for you."
The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven nearly out of his mind by feminine _entr"actes_ of this sort, against the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up into the aether in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[52] All in an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot--one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they may extend--whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand ma.s.ses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making her husband better and holier. The author"s fondest wishes go not beyond this.
Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast from Firmian"s love, Lenette"s was like a rose somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband"s endless arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this cla.s.s of women also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a housekeeping engine--the stage-manageress of a great household theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody--from Hamburg to Ofen.
Moreover, our couple, like ph[oe]nixes and giants, were childless: the two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly rehea.r.s.ed the character of _pere de famille_, and dispatcher of invitations to be G.o.dfather, but it never came to a performance.
What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette"s heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circ.u.mspect, the grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, the heavy and the dull, as----these three lines have; but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkaes, again, was like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, "I"m sure people must think you"re not quite right in the head;" to which he would answer, "And am I?" He concealed the beauty of his character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found pleasure in the thought that he travestied--not imitated--the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment--that of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour into action is a satirical _improvisatore_. Every male reader understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful lens which should _burn_ that spectrum back into its pristine whiteness,--but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts--and in their realm of shadows, France.
Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers--a man who didn"t behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say--and people a.s.sured her it was a fact--often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,--concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully--as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province--and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in--with linen to be made up, and so on--didn"t they very often see him jump up and, without a "With your leave," or "By your leave," to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork"s-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality.
That portion of earth"s surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.
For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer to Siebenkaes"s suit, in which all he demanded was justice and equity--in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkaes could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse.
This juridical h.e.l.l-river took Firmian"s breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous pet.i.tions for postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, "Look out--mind your head!" Alas! there is something _new_ in _every_ pain. He had even taken legal steps in antic.i.p.ation of it. A few weeks before he had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise"s ward. A young notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood--particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often been present when the guardian"s register-ships came in--and a postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkaes (like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.
With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian and robber.
When Blaise"s denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed in _her_ eyes now to enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had himself told her that his father-in-law"s three applications for delay had been the result of _his_ intercession, which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon Blaise"s plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa"s revengeful soul in return for the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian"s house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.
Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what Siebenkaes said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise"s wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: "You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this doc.u.ment of Blaise"s to your behaviour to the Venner." Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette"s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.
He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful day.
"Lenette," said Siebenkaes suddenly--he often preferred vaulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had so utterly misunderstood--"Lenette, I"ll tell you what we"ll do this afternoon; we"ll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but it _is_ the day which all the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and the weather is really _too_ magnificent. We"ll go and sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes--and our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?"
Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair s.e.x, is their love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (the _latter_, however, only as regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much money.
A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) be _quite_ ready and dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.
Our couple set forth at two o"clock in the happiest possible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the afternoon.
Even at two o"clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and lighted up many a dark and narrow life.
Siebenkaes pointed out the eagle"s perch to Lenette while they were still at some distance from it--the alpenstock or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter"s-stand where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew"s-quarter of duns, liberating at his coronation at least _one_ debtor, namely, himself. They had room and to spare to "spread themselves out" (so to speak) upstairs in the members" hall--he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with her work at another on the left.
How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined, but not described.
Lenette put on one stocking of her husband"s after another--put them on her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her "your very humble and obedient servant" from the open window to numbers of the most genteel she-heretics as they pa.s.sed, wearing her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.
The strictest religious and political parity being established by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing his "Devil"s Papers," and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the high places, the _sommites_ of the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel society.
When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a child"s trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks" nests in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remembered the time, looking forward to a repet.i.tion of it; and he could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely, corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had a mind.
And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away his life.
"How delightful it is, wife," he said, "that what parts me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a monastery." This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature; however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What he _had_ meant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to ourselves a repet.i.tion of it sloping the other way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an Italian"s longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.
As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all, _she_) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little happiness.
At last they left the s.p.a.cious room, the sun now robing them in purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette"s attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the sun--at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range--that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend.
Ah! how strong is love in distance--be it distance of s.p.a.ce, or of time, of the future or the past--ay, or that greater distance still--beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.
For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation for _good_ folks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of salutation--accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can never be seen on a child"s face--Siebenkaes returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat--which he didn"t take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a garden _paling_ lecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had an opportunity. "Indeed, love," he said, "I couldn"t help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all days in the year."
The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkaes had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hat _itself_ at all. Well, the first walk he took after a.s.suming this double hat, or hat"s hat, was to a grocer"s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off his _hat_ to n.o.body--with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.
Of course, when he forgot--and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so--to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere sh.e.l.l of a hat _right_ OFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just to _touch_ it courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.
And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.
It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest _here_ (as regarded our couple"s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his _pro_- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, the _os coccygis_, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, the _background_ of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. "Hy!
Mr.!" cried Lenette; "what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?"
The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of "no charge for wine samples," and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with _him_, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband"s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, "Why, it"s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you"ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!" Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much _sangfroid_, and said, "_Prove_ that, if you please! But, mind, _I"ll_ CHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel."
At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband"s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. "Ey! you riff-raff," she snapped out. "But I"ll have what"s my own--you villain!" she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this--he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, "There!" after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.
Siebenkaes was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord--when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkaes saw on the instant that Stiefel"s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which _Stiefel"s_ would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white b.u.t.terfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel"s flowery path, _out of doors_--when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body--which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette"s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day?
Stiefel"s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian"s very small.
Before I explain it, I will say, "I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in the _Black_ Sea, without having to pa.s.s over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?" However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery--her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian"s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkaes, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of a _fiancee_, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality--and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, "No more, thank you--I am helped;" but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman"s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman"s soul is by nature a beautiful _fresco_ painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can"t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizen_ess_ of the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.
I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circ.u.mstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of the _vis-a-vis_ phaeton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa"s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pa.s.s with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkaes had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.
After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.
It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiae of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.
Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkaes"s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically--a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkaes"s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his "Selections from the Devil"s Papers" at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters.
He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[53]
However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don"t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar"s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, "This _sweet_ emotion of _my_ heart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs." We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. "Yes, I have to thank _them_ for this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in their _own_ heads--kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!" Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, "Great as is the pain which his satires cause _me_, they cause _him_ far more; luckily, _my_ pain is only mental!" Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner"s feet, a wrestler"s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and that _their_ extraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.
With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkaes begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress--one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.
He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers--only in time of need.
It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. "Little authors," he said, "are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings--e.g. self-conceit--in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius.
Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when they _are merited_--though I am aware Cicero is against me here--for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not.
Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse." If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony against _the race_, but the _individual_ will be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.
For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang"s essay, ent.i.tled "Praemissa Historiae Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium--Continuatione XX." It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, so _hatching_. The new year fell on the Sat.u.r.day, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and more _in advance_ of actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities.
With her eye on her _index expurgandorum_, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with b.a.l.l.s of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart"s full content. As for Siebenkaes, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.
For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would p.a.w.n the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)--because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette"s funereal Misereres.