6. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.-- Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
Knef"s answer is wretched: "By your well-born"s favor, dated the 6th instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by being pa.s.sed from one book to another, and therein through the force of the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent doc.u.ment in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like Maupertuis"s half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all the merry-makings of mankind.
Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the ancient leaven and most of our inst.i.tutions and pandects and edicts had for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare _hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest cla.s.ses, than to the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey"s statue, and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcae into the greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but a little more circ.u.mstantially. For the stately initial letters of this day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a third.
In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was coming today for the s.p.a.ce of five minutes. In the morning, she set her two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known superst.i.tion that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it, and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own birthday.
Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of another"s life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the sh.e.l.l of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands, who are _their_ regents and cla.s.sic authors, underwent both. Victor, whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself, was glad that Eymann"s shoulders must bear half of to-day"s honor.
Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces, the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself; but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas, and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound, like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the _month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its _hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
As Flamin and Victor pa.s.sed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one, which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true Pa.s.sion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o"clock in the afternoon no fun, but dog"s-work; but then we should have broken loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox"s [his horse"s] bit, and in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his ta.s.selled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible, but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court Chaplain, just as men are s.n.a.t.c.hed from among men to overtop and master the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out, into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann"s face was longer than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head lie and cool there, and said, "If I don"t ferret out the Bible, then I don"t see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the sc.r.a.pe."
As the Bible was sought before Luther"s time, so now was the Canstein Bible, with its black beetle"s-wing-sh.e.l.ls. If anything could make this hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann"s band, like his reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press; for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a reformation, by a quarter of an hour"s interim, than that, instead of simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian, "redounds to a clergyman"s honor, especially as he seeks the truths in the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up to the gallows.
As the Chaplain pa.s.sed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks"
child, which to-day"s lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw, thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying, meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, "What"s that to me?" if I didn"t stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of the students" or Dr. Luther"s mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical vellum-mould, and Seiler"s Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then, _auto-da-fes_ also?"
I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to ask why the case of a mouse"s death should interest it more than the shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another"s hair-puff more than Christina"s abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest arises from the source whence it comes with those Oto whom the case really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious mood stand so near to our mirthful.
Except Flamin, all moved to church, G.o.dfather and G.o.dchild. It was a so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks, to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders (_circularia_) do.
In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again, or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair childhood"s days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones, which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew, opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the voluntary and Eymann"s kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm, quickening time, when a father is still G.o.d the Father, and a mother the mother of G.o.d, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits, graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus, how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round, and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then, how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising, and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year, went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_ creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the Exchequer-master of the poor"s-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long, horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but stiffened statues?
After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five o"clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom b.u.t.terflies that had burst the coc.o.o.ns and waked up bottle-flies,--tie back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree, out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations: "Master G.o.dfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little six-weeks"-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform after five o"clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the first manna in life"s wilderness. But not till five o"clock did the mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson"s lady--the fact that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen n.o.ble residences still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle, which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
It strikes five o"clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the tide,--all is rehabilitated.
But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy, waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man"s boot or a military horse"s-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink) that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....
But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold a.s.saf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with a woodman"s axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be on my account, regularly out of his senses.
Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of _me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth, like ribbons from a juggler"s,--what would it avail me?
Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner to wit:--
I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the mining-superintendent on St. John"s, him and his heirs and a.s.signs, from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no narrative.
II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia juris_--_rest.i.tutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem laesionis enormis et enormissimae_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress of St. John"s, May 4, 1793.
Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground of decision.
7. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin"s Promotion.--Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse, must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like Cook, may well circ.u.mnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest princes have rivalled each other in their pa.s.sion for furnishing it with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact, these ma.s.ses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay therein sixty years.--
The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden, particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand, but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several city-parsons have wished they could wear it. b.u.t.terfly-show-gla.s.ses kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early cuc.u.mbers of wax. Cuc.u.mbers which consisted of real cuc.u.mbers, he was the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order to rejoice whenever a gla.s.s bottle was broken in his house: he could then carry this ice- or gla.s.s-mountain (which, in the case of wines, unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden, and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the b.u.t.ton-holes of his antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must first a.n.a.lyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such a bed as an Arndt"s garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the garden."
Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness, make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
Eymann"s clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a continued family-room without roof or part.i.tion.
As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit, that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin"s and Clotilda"s meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the journeyman"s greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Gottingen,--"every good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends, brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid"s string, and though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too; and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then, oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing, cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously, and--then fall down again."
At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson"s wife. She had on a c.r.a.pe hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful face. But her eye avoided Flamin"s eye, and only at times stole thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual medical uncertainty of her s.e.x, whether such an operation often transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her, had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel"s note. He could not steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly, he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend if he blabs out how on St. Thomas"s day last year they had a slight headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree, and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when he opened his eyes, and Clotilda"s large eyes stood opened full upon him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of 45, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped back from the bewildering orangery.
However, she was not embarra.s.sed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up, as in a gla.s.s, the impression of her charms with which men so often win to themselves the attention of woman"s vanity. She was, as I have said, not embarra.s.sed, but went on to tell her listener something further of Emanuel"s character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher, had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
John"s day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it; but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on St. John"s day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had had great friends on his bosom, but all had pa.s.sed into the grave, and therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy, over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy; whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin"s prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets; Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with tongue and heart. His Lordship"s surprise was greater than _his_ emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin into the Administrative Council.