Part 15

At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all, unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have seen all.

As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so consecrated by Nature.

He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases, animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera, according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother" (so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his relations on the father's side?

O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past, a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul, have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that, while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.

As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior (not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a _sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in the sciences than we with the whole hand.

She related that her father would not marry her till after two years, and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian, named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but equally--stupid.

But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street, while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry kernel in a walnut.

I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less consequence.

Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a _distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel, into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff, which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!

Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits, but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day," replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a garter it would be different.

Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.

He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_; the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_ it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing paper and without engravings.

He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her, than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."

At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in, and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams, and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.

11. DOG-POST-DAY.

Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre à Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.

Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.

In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.

Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.

In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and say rather, men who write much make fast writers.

And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach; but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half as often.

To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of three inches.

Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ... _Stultis sat!_[119]

In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood, with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait for it all....

Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.

For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such accidental touches, laugh at them _in naturâ_;[121]--he pledges himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic, that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact, that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some) been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the _Scientiâ media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive his people off, but they always took it as a joke.

It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by _investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy, with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose, as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need. And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do, the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic _gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely, without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers, that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict the following

HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.

IN FIVE ACTS.

The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain from it.

Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play, the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_ (Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it. These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central one.

The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn, would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees. But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is over....

I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner; for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.

Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on paper is already two pages long....

Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot, especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.