As at a real death, so in this mimetic one, the Genius led his pupil"s approach toward heaven on the step-ladder of the five senses. He invested the semblance of death, to the advantage of the reality, with all possible charms, and Gustavus will certainly die one day more rapturously than one of us. While others bring us to see h.e.l.l open, he promised him, that, like a Stephen, on his dying day he should see heaven open already, even before he ascended into it. And this actually occurred. Their subterranean valley of Jehoshaphat had beside the afore-mentioned cellar stairs a long, horizontal cross-pa.s.sage, opening at the foot of the mountain out into the valley and the village which lay therein, and barred up at certain intervals by two doors. In the night before the first of June, when only the white sickle of the moon hung in the horizon, and like an old visage gray with age, turned in the blue night toward the hidden sun, he had arranged that in the midst of a prayer these doors should imperceptibly be thrown open--and now, Gustavus, for the first time in thy life, and on thy knees, thou lookest out into the broad theatre, nine million square miles broad, of human doings and sufferings; but only just as we in the nightly years of childhood and under the veil wherewith a mother guarded us from the flies, so dost thou glance out into the sea of night which spreads out before thee into immensity with swinging blossoms and shooting fire-flies, that seem to move among the stars, and with the whole mult.i.tudinous movement of creation! O, thou happy Gustavus! this night-piece shall remain long years after in thy soul, as a green island that has gone down in the sea, it shall lie encamped behind deep shadows and look yearningly at thee as a long past joyous eternity....
But after a few minutes the Genius folded him in his arms and veiled the eager eyes in his bosom; imperceptibly the heavenly gates swung to again and s.n.a.t.c.hed his spring-time away.
In twelve hours he will be standing in the midst of it; but I am already oppressed with suspense as I draw nearer and nearer to this mild resurrection. It moves me, not merely because only one single time in my life can I have such a birthday, worthy of heaven, as Gustavus"s, rise and set in my soul, a day whose fire I feel in my pulse, and of which only a faint reflection falls upon this paper--nor yet merely for the reason that presently the Genius withdraws, unknown both to author and to reader; but chiefly on this account, that I am to cast my Gustavus out of the still diamond mine, where the diamond of his heart formed itself so transparent and so brilliant, and so without spot or flaw, into the hot world which will soon hold up to it its concave mirror and crumble it to pieces; from his dead calm of the pa.s.sions out into the so-called heaven, where by the side of the saints walk fully as many of the reprobate. But as he will then be at liberty also to gaze upon the face of great nature, it is not, after all, his fate alone that makes me anxious, but mine and that of others, for I reflect through how much rubbish our teachers drag our inner man as a malefactor before he is permitted to stand upright! Ah, had a Pythagoras, instead of the Latin one and the Syrian History, let our heart become a softly trembling _aeolian Harp_, on which Nature should play and express her feelings, and not an alarming _fire-drum_ of all pa.s.sions--how far--since Genius, but never Virtue, has limits, and everything pure and good can grow still purer--might we not have risen!
Just as Gustavus waits over a night, so will I postpone my picture one night that I may give it to-morrow with full rapture of soul.
FIFTH SECTION.
Resurrection.
Four Priests stand in the broad cathedral of nature and pray at G.o.d"s altars: the mountains:--the ice-gray Winter with his snow-white surplice--the in-gathering Autumn with sheaves under his arm, which he lays on G.o.d"s altar that men may take them--the fiery youth, Summer, who toils till night in bringing his offerings--and, finally, the child-like Spring, with his white church decoration of lilies and blossoms, who, like a child, strews flowers and blossom-cups around the lofty spirit, and in whose prayer all that hear it join. And for the _children_ of men Spring is surely the fairest priest.
This flower-priest was the first the little Gustavus beheld at the altar. Before sunrise on the first of June (down below it was evening) the Genius knelt down in silence and offered up with his eyes and mute, trembling lips a prayer for Gustavus, which spread out its wings over his whole untried life. A flute breathed out overhead a tender, loving call, and the Genius said: "It is calling us up out of the earth toward heaven; come with me, my Gustavus." The little one trembled for joy and fear. The flute sounds on. They go up the nocturnal pa.s.sage of the Jacob"s-ladder. Two anxious hearts almost crush with their beatings the b.r.e.a.s.t.s that hold them. The Genius pushes open the doors, behind which stands the world, and lifts his child out on to the earth and under the heavens.... And now the high waves of the living sea clap their hands together above Gustavus. With choking breath, with compressed eyelids, with overwhelmed soul, he stands before the illimitable face of nature, and clings trembling more and more closely to his Genius.... But when, after the first shock of amazement, he had flung open, torn open his soul to these streams; when he felt the thousand arms with which the lofty Soul of the Universe clasped him to itself; when he was able to see the green, tumultuous flowery life round about him, and the nodding lilies, which seemed to him more living than his, and when he feared he should tread the trembling flower to death; when his eye, cast upward again, sank in the depth of heaven, the opening of infinity; and when he shrank with apprehension of the breaking down of the dark red mountain piles moving along through the heavens and the lands floating over head; when he saw the mountains resting like new earths on ours; and when he witnessed the endless life stirring around him, the feathered life flying along with the cloud, the humming life at his feet, the golden, crawling life on all leaves, the live arms and heads of the giant trees all beckoning to him; and when the morning wind seemed to him the great breath of a coming Genius, and when the fluttering foliage whispered, and the apple tree threw upon his cheek a cold leaf; when, finally, his eye, moving heavily under its burden, let itself be borne on the white wings of a b.u.t.terfly, which, soundless and solitary, balanced above gay flowers and hung like a silvery auricula[12] to the broad green leaf.... then did the heavens begin to burn, the trailing edge of her mantle blazed off from the fleeing night, and on the rim of the earth, like a crown of G.o.d fallen from the divine throne, lay the _Sun_. "There stands G.o.d!" cried Gustavus; and with dazzled eye and mind, and with the greatest prayer which the bosom of a ten-year-old child ever conceived, he flung himself headlong upon the flowers....
Only open thy eyes again, thou darling! Thou art no longer gazing into the glowing globe of lava; thou art lying on the overshadowing breast of thy mother, and her loving heart in that bosom is thy Sun and thy G.o.d--for the first time thou seest the ineffably gracious, womanly and maternal smile, for the first time hearest the parental voice; for the first two blessed ones who came to meet thee in heaven are thy parents.
O heavenly home! The sun beams, all dew-drops sparkle beneath it, eight tears of joy descend with the milder image of the sun, and four human beings stand blissful and touched with emotion on an earth which lies so far from heaven! Veiled Destiny! will our death be like that of Gustavus? Veiled destiny! that sittest behind our earth and behind a mask and lea vest us time _to be_--ah! when death dissolves us and a great Genius has lifted us out of the vault into heaven, then when its suns and joys overpower our soul, wilt thou give us also there a familiar human breast, on which we may open our feeble eyes? O Destiny!
dost thou give us again, what here we can never forget? No eye will be directed to this page, which has nothing there to weep over and nothing there it yearns to meet again: ah, will it, after this life, full of dead ones, meet no well-known form, to which we can say: Welcome? ...
Fate stands dumb behind the mask; the human tear lies dark upon the grave; the sun shines not into the tear.--But in Immortality and before the face of G.o.d our loving heart dies not.
SIXTH SECTION.
Forcible Abduction of the Fair Face.--Important Portrait.
The state of astonishment into which Gustavus had, all day long by one object after another, been wrought up, and the loss of sleep, ended his first heavenly day with a feverish evening, which he would have had to relieve by a gush of tears, even without any other reason. But he had one: his Genius had, during the tumult in the garden, been s.n.a.t.c.hed away from the darling with a speechless kiss, and had left nothing behind but a leaf to the mother. That is, he had cut a leaf of note-paper into two halves; the one contained the dissonances of the melody and the questions of the text thereto, on the other stood the solutions and the answers. The dissonant half was to come into the hands of his Gustavus; the other he kept. "I and my friend," said he, "shall one day recognize each other thereby in the world"s wilderness; in the fact, that he has questions, to which I have the answers." The poodle too, which was every day growing bigger, he took with him....
Where shall we see thee again, unknown, beautiful enthusiast? Thou art all unaware how thy orphaned pupil cries and sobs for thee, and how the new, star-studded heaven does not please him so much as his chamber-ceiling when thou wast with him, and how the lighted candles transform every apartment to the still cavern in which he had loved thee and thou him. Even so in life"s evening we bend down over the graves of our early friends, whom no one mourns but we; till at length a strange youth buries the last old man out of the loving circle; but not a single soul remembers the fair, youthful days of the last old man!
In the morning he was well again and cheery; the sun dried up his eyes, and the misty image of his genius under the veil of the past night receded far into the background. I am sorry to have to lay it to the charge of his years and his character, that, with the exception of the evening hours of the most painful yearning, he let the image of a friend be crowded out by nearer images and thrust far backward. All flowers were now playthings for him, every animal a playmate and every human being a bird Ph[oe]nix; every change in the heavens, every sunset, every minute overwhelmed him with novelties.
It was with him as with children of distinction who come out into the country; who peer into, handle, jump over, everything in the new earth and the new sky. For it is an indescribable good fortune for children of rank, that their parents, who generally make little account of Nature, nevertheless train them between high walls and high houses, which do not leave thirty-eight square feet of heaven visible, as in hot-house gardens with high walls, that Nature may come before their eyes as little as to those of their parents; whereby their feeling for both is kept as unworn above the earth, as if they had been actually brought up under it; nay, they see sunrise for the first time almost later than Gustavus--in the post-chaise or in Carlsbad.
His parents treated him as a new-born child, and did not like to have him out of their sight; they would hardly let him go out into the castle-garden and never down the mountain, where he would be in danger from the post-road. He had brought up with him, too, from his subterranean school-room a certain bashfulness which ordinary men and almost his father take for simplicity, but which men in higher life, if it only appears, as with him, in the company not of a staring, but of an overfull, enthusiastic eye, regard as the order-cross of a brother of the order. Nevertheless, eight days after, his parents repented not that they had shut him up, but that they had ever let him out.
The wife of the Head-forester, von Knor, had brought a lot of Moravian men and women with her to hear the disciple of the grave; an aftermath-sheaf of old maids had already bespoken the visit four weeks before, and had renewed the invitation, just to get sight of such a wonderful child. The Moravian brethren were lively and free, within the bounds of propriety; the sisters in a body formed a wall around a tall clock, whose case was bordered with angels blowing trumpets--they could not be torn away from the horn-blowers. Nor could they be persuaded to take anything; they opened neither their jaws nor their eyes, and the Captain was black with suppressed vexation. At last the lip of a sister touched a wine-gla.s.s, the others touched theirs; as much as one nibbled off of a cake just so big a crumb nibbled the others; one shiver would agitate this whole obligato company of two-footed sheep. The aftermath of old damsels, on the contrary, plunged into everything; on solid and in fluid, like Amphibia, they were equally at home; they had never in their chewing and chattering life stirred any member but the tongue.
But now when for the benefit or so many spectators the wondrous creature was to come forth, behold! he was--gone. Every corner was dusted out, long-lost things were found, every place was screamed into, every nook and every bush--no Gustavus! The Captain, whose first stage of distress was always a kind of anger, let the whole expectant sisterhood sit there with eyes wide open; but the Captain"s lady, whose distress took hold of tenderer parts of her nature, drew her seat close up to them for sympathy. But when all anxious, inquiring, running faces came back more and more disconsolate, and when they actually found behind the open castle-gate the plucked flowers which the little fellow had stuck into his little shaded bed, and which were still moist with his sprinkling, then were the faces of the parents darkened with despair. "Ah! the angel has plunged into the Rhine," said she, and he said nothing to the contrary. At _another_ time he would have stamped such a _non sequitur_ under foot, for the Rhine ran half a league from the castle; but here the reasoner in both was desperate anxiety, which makes far wider leaps than hope. I spoke just now of _another_ time, therefore, because I know what the Captain"s way usually was, namely, to be, from very compa.s.sion, excited against the sufferer himself.
Never, for instance, did his look express a stronger curse against his wife than when she was sick (and a single swift globule of blood would upset her); she must not murmur in the least; and when that was obeyed, she must not sigh; that done, she must not even make a sorrowful face; and if she obeyed all these directions she must not, in fact, be sick.
He had the folly of idle and genteel people, he would always be jolly.
But here, when for once his pot of luck lay in fragments, another"s sigh sweetened his own and his wrath at the careless troop of servants and at the dry sheep and aftermath of the sisterhood.
When the child had stayed out all night and the whole of the next forenoon, and when they actually found his little hat in the woods on the carriage-road, then did the stings of anxiety grow into the festering pains of inflicted wounds. There is no agitation of the soul against which it is so hard to bring an effective argument as against anxiety: I have, therefore, for a year and a day ceased to attempt any; I just willingly admit the worst it urges and then simply a.s.sail the next inward emotion which may grow out of the apprehended worst with the question, "and what if it should come?"
Every toadstool in the woods was trodden flat and every woodp.e.c.k.e.r scared away, in the effort to find a head for the hat, but in vain; and on the third day the Captain, whose face was an etching-plate of agony, wandered, without any distinct design of searching, so deeply into the woods that he would hardly have noticed the swift pa.s.sing through the thicket of a traveling carriage, set out with trunks and servants, had not, issuing from it like a thunder-clap of gladness, the voice of his lost son startled his soul. He runs after it, the carriage shoots ahead, and out in the open ground he sees it already sending up a cloud of dust beyond his castle. Beside himself he comes up storming into the castle-yard to start in pursuit of it and--let it go. For up at the house-door stood the inmates of the castle who had suddenly run together and were now gathered in a knot around Gustavus, the castle dogs barked without having any clearly defined reason, and all were talking and questioning in such a way that one could not properly hear from the child a single answer. The carriage as it whirled by had let him out. On his neck hung by a black ribbon his portrait. His eyes were red and moist with the pangs of homesickness. He told of long, long houses, which he took streets to be, and of his little sister who had played with him, and of his new hat; but no soul would have been the wiser for all this had not the cook spied a card which had fallen at his feet. This the Captain read, and saw that _he_ was not to read it, but his wife. He deciphered and translated it out of the Italian and the female handwriting thus:
"Can a mother, then, excuse herself to a mother, for having so long kept her child from her? Even if you do not forgive me my fault, still I cannot repent it. I found your dear little one three days ago wandering about in the woods, where I stole him into my carriage, in order to save him from worse thieves, and to find out his parents. Ah, I will just confess it to you: I should have taken him with me, even without either of these excuses. O, not because of his heavenly beauty, but because he looks so perfectly like, even to his hair, my dear, lost Guido; I can, even now, hardly give him up. Ah, it is already many years since fate in a strange manner s.n.a.t.c.hed my dearest child, living, out of my bosom. Yours comes back to-day--mine, never!--Pardon the neck-pendant. The portrait you will take to be his, so like is he to my son: but it is really that of my Guido. His own I had also painted for me, and keep it, in order to have a duplicate image of my good child.
Should I one day come to see your Gustavus, in his full bloom, I should gaze long upon him; I should say to myself: so must my Guido be now looking; so much innocence will he, too, have in his eyes; so very pleasing will he, also, be.--Ah, my little daughter weeps that her playmate is to leave her--and I do too; she gives back only a brother: but I, a son. May you and he be happier!--Excuse me from giving my name."
They all fell to guessing who the auth.o.r.ess could be. The Captain alone looked sad, and said nothing. I know not whether from sorrow at the recollection of his first lost son, or because he thought as I, in fact, do about the whole affair. I conjecture, namely, that the lost Guido is just his own child; and the correspondent is the beloved whom the commercial agent Roper had wrested out of his hands. I shall give my reason, by and by. Gustavus"s beauty may be demonstrated, either _a priori_ (by reasoning downward from cause to effect) or, secondly, by a reverse process, from consequent to antecedent. His forcing-house, in which he was trained and hidden, very naturally bleached his lily-skin to a white ground on which two pale cheek-roses, or only their reflection and the darker and denser rosebud of the upper lip had lighted. His eye was the open heaven which you happen upon in a thousand cases of five-year-old children, and only in ten of people fifty years old; and this eye was, moreover, veiled or beautified by long eye-lashes, and by a somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic haze.
Finally, neither exertion nor pa.s.sion had struck their marking-axe and its sharp letters into this fair tree, nor had the death sentence which was to announce its fall, been cut into its bark. But all beauty is soft, hence, the fairest people are the most tranquil; hence, violent labor distorts poor children and poor races.
But the year has not yet come, in which I can prove the beauty of Gustavus by the _a posteriori_ process.
For as the auctioneer was at that time my most intimate friend, he executed for my pleasure the little trick of setting up for sale the paintings and engravings precisely on a day, when, on account of the masquerade, not a soul of the great world of Unterscheerau came out to the auction, I, alone, excepted; as expiatory payment for the same, I had to endure a thousand things. The whole town and suburb had contributed to this rubbish-heap of furniture, and was seller and buyer at once. In this auction appeared all European potentates, but wretchedly drawn and colored; and a n.o.bleman of _bon sens_ set up his two parents and was fain to pa.s.s them off as good knee-pieces (or half-length portraits);--in Rome, inversely, parents sold their children, only _in natura_. The n.o.bleman hoped I would bid on his papa and mamma; but I overbade on nothing, except the portrait of Gustavus, which was knocked off to me. The n.o.bleman was named Roper, of whom I have mentioned above, that he on one and the same day became husband and step-father.
And here, verily, thou hangest, Gustavus, opposite me and my writing-table, and when I am thinking upon anything, my eye always falls upon thee. Many blame me, my little hero, that I have nailed thee up here between Shakespeare and Winkelmann (by Bause); but hast thou not--a thing few think of--an arched nose, on which rest high and weighty thoughts; such a one as under the hand of death is often bent more beautifully; and hast thou not under the bony architrave a broad eye through which as through a triumphal gate nature enters into the soul, and a dome-crowned house of the spirit, and all else that ent.i.tles and enables thee to hold up thy head beside thy copper-plate neighbors?
The reader ought to know (but it occurs farther on) what obliges me just now, suddenly to finish and close the present sector.
SECOND EXTRA LEAF.
Straw Wreath Discourse of a Consistorial Secretary, Wherein he and it prove that Adultery and Divorce are Allowable.
I confess here, our enlightened age should be named an adulterous generation. I certainly said once at the marketplace in Ma.r.s.eilles, that I held the miserable thing, matrimonial infidelity, to be right.
Even long before I got to Munich, I said one ought to annex to the Metropolitan Church, of the marriage bed, a chapel of ease--in Upper Saxony I said, if that countess went on bearing for a whole year something daily: then with countesses even now, at least the _foregone_ year were to be had--in the ten German circles I certainly expressed myself in ten different ways:--But it was not then in place anywhere to expound the matter clearly out of physiology, but only here.
It was _Sanctorius_[13] who seated himself upon a Delphic night stool and there sat out the truth, that man got himself clothed upon every eleven years with a new body--the old one, like the German body politic, wearing away piece by piece till there remains of the whole mummy not so much as an apothecary will give, shaved down minutely, in a tea-spoon. _Bernouilli_ contradicted Sanctorius up and down and showed us that he had blundered, for not in eleven, but in three years, the one of the twin brothers evaporated and the other crystallized. In short French and Russians change body oftener than the shirt on the body, and a Province is getting new bodies and a new religious Provincial jointly in three years as aforesaid.
The matter is by no means indifferent. For it is accordingly impossible that a baldhead, who celebrated his marriage jubilee should point to a bit of skin on his whole body as big as a penny and remark: "With this sc.r.a.p of skin I stood 25 years ago at the altar and was, together with the rest, coupled to my jubilant wife here." That the jubilee-king cannot possibly do. The marriage ring, to be sure, has not dropped off, but the ring finger which it encircled has, long ago. In fact it is a trick beyond all tricks, and I appeal to other Consistorial secretaries. For the poor bride goes up joyfully under the bed canopy with the _statua curulis_ of a bodily bridegroom and thinks--what knows she of good physiology?--that she has in the body something solid, a piece of iron, an article of real estate, in short a head with hairs, of which she can one day say, they have grown gray on mine and on my cap! Such is her hope; meanwhile in the midst of her hoping the rogue of a body works off its whole set of members, as a student his p.a.w.ned student"s goods, in the course of three years, in infinitesimal particles in mist and darkness. If she turns round on New Year"s Eve--there lies in the marriage bed beside her a mere wax cast or second edition which the former body has left of itself, and in which there remains no longer a single leaf of the old one. What now--when the cubic contents of the bridal bed and of the marriage bed are so different--is a wife to think of the whole matter! I mean, if, _e. g_., a whole female consisting of (_e. g_. the Lady Consistorial President, the lady Vice-President, the lady Consistorial Secretary) after three years finds upon the pillow an entirely different male Consistory, from what the marriage promised this dissolved one should be: what course is a woman to take, who, if she is a consistorial half, knows right well _quid juris_? She, I say, who must have heard a hundred times over at the dinner table, that such an absconding of the male body is a cursed _malicious abandonment_ or _desertio malitiosa_, which entirely releases her from her marriage vows--and in fact such a straw widow may actually have read Luther _de causis matrimonii_ and have inferred therefrom that he does not forbid a maliciously deserted wife after a year or half a year to contract a new marriage. To betake herself to the aforesaid new marriage will manifestly be the first duty and design of such a deserted one; but as the new extant body of a husband cannot help the evaporation of its predecessor, accordingly, rather than distress him, she will do it without his knowledge and without vindictive feeling--perhaps when he is at the Exchange--or in the pulpit--or at the fair--or on board ship--or behind the session table or abroad somewhere.
Meanwhile the husband is no fool, but has always enough of physiology about him to know that the wife also changes her body as often as her maids; consequently he needs not to watch any chance. _Nov. 22_ c.25 of itself hands him the right of divorce, if she has run away from him for a night; but here the Consistorial Counselloress has absolutely blown away for ever and moreover repeats this evaporation every three years--she, who, nevertheless, according to "Lange"s Clerical Rights,"
which the Consistorial Counsellor has on his book-shelf, would be obliged to follow him, if he were banished the country, even though, in the marriage-contract she had reserved the right to stay at home. Thus speaks Lange to husbands on the point. In the great world, where true chast.i.ty and universal knowledge, including of course physiology, are at home, the point has long since been treated with intelligence and propriety, and conscientiousness has been carried to great length. For as, in that sphere, a husband three years after the wedding-feast no longer expects to find in his spouse an apothecary"s ounce of blood, nor a thin vein in which it ran, remaining of the old one; as, therefore, he thinks to find again the emigrated parts of his good lady much sooner and more surely in any other than in herself; as, accordingly, he must, much rather, regard love for his partner as infidelity to her and with her--(and, strictly taken, it is even so)--: it follows now, that the question is mainly one of pure morality; he, therefore, leaves to that a.s.semblage of veins, nervous ganglia, finger-nails and n.o.bler parts, which one calls _in toto_ his wife--leaves her (or it) his name, half his credit, and half his children, because, on the whole, in the great world, one does not like publicly to dissolve public connections, and prefers, at last, to walk in a thousand air-woven fetters; but _this_ his respect for morality and public sentiment does not allow him, to have one and the same dwelling--table--society with a wife who has another body; he does not even (which, perhaps, is being too scrupulous) like to appear with her in public and refrains at least in his house from all that of which he or Origen made themselves incapable.
There are miserable, faded pulpits, which may object to my position, that the wedded souls remain when the bodies have evaporated. For with the soul (therefore with the memory, the thinking faculty, the moral principle, etc.), at the present day there is little or no union in wedlock, but only with that which hangs round it. Secondly, it may be learned of any materialist on the philosophic exchange, that the soul is nothing but a sucker of the body, which, therefore, with both man and wife, pa.s.ses away simultaneously with the body. One need not, however, take that ground, but one need only concur with Hume, who writes that there is no such thing as a soul, but merely a collection of ideas that cling together like toads"-sp.a.w.n and so creep through the brain and think themselves. Under such circ.u.mstances the bridal pair may thank G.o.d, if their pair of coupled souls will hold together only as long as the two pairs of dancing-pumps at the marriage-ball. One sees this too the forenoon after the honeymoon.
Therefore, as has been said, no Canonist can put off the week in which man and wife may lawfully proceed to breach of marriage vows, longer than to the fourth year after betrothal; only for people of the world and of standing, this is hard and too rigorous, especially if they know from their "Keil" (the anatomist) that in a year the old body has entirely thawed away--a miserable sixteen pound avoirdupois alone excepted. Hence, it has often been my idea, that if I should bring my breach of marriage into the very first year (as many do) I should really be unfaithful to only a few pounds of my consort, (who weighs 107)--namely the sixteen pounds that still remained.
On the same exchange of bodies whereon one grounds his breach of marriage vows, must the Consistory ground its rule of divorce. For, as people often remain together, in open wedlock, nine, eighteen years after marriage, whereas all physiologists know that there are two new married bodies in the case, and without priestly consecration, accordingly the Consistory is now bound to look into it and interfere and divorce the two foreign bodies by a decree or two. Hence one will never hear of a conscientious Consistory"s making any difficulty in separating Christians who are already joined in wedlock; but on the other hand one will quite as seldom hear of a case in which it divorces those who have merely promised marriage, without the greatest difficulty; and very naturally; for in the former case, that of a long marriage, true infidelity is to be averted by the bill of divorcement, because there are uncoupled bodies; but _here_, in the case of betrothal, the bodies which have made the engagement are not yet fully present, and they must first live for a long time in wedlock, before they are ripe for divorce. This is the true solution of an apparent contradiction, which has already misled so many weak minds to regard us all in Consistory as greedy of perquisites, and me as the marker, and our green session-boards as green billiard tables, around which President and Councillors skip with long queues, to play out our games; ah! besides, a Consistorial committee cuts more pens than coins money.
Why, on the whole, do not the Pastors report to us every couple in their parishes that have cohabited over three years, that they may be divorced at the proper time? Such a divorce, for which no further grounds are needed than this, that the two people have lived together a great while, has, indeed, in all countries no other design than that of allowing them to be afterward reunited regularly with their renewed bodies. The Consistory and I fare most accursedly in the matter, if things are not somewhat mended, when the new minister mounts the throne. Verily, such a spiritual administrative college often applies the long saw, and saws the marriage blocks or beds, in which the wedded pairs had lain for twenty-one years, who in so long a time had been seven times at least (infidelity and divorce falling due every three years) been proper subjects for infidelity and divorce; what forfeiture of perquisites, since we must needs multiply four-fold the costs of divorce, which we might have multiplied seven-fold! Besides such liquidation of divorce-expenses amounts to little, because it is notoriously moderated and, in fact, by the Consistory itself. Besides, one practises in the Consistorial Chamber the forethought and afterthought, by which I always, after fifteen or twenty years, draw out again the bill of perquisites, which the divorced pair had already paid, and hand it anew to the Consistorial messenger and collector, not so much for the purpose of getting the fees twice over (which is a secondary matter) as to duplicate the receipt, in case the divorced couple should have lost the first, and also to guard them against a third payment. One would make everything easy for the couple, by allowing the payment to be made in several and small installments.
... And to-day is three years since I too was joined in marriage....
but the straw-wreath oration on that occasion was too poor to repeat....