Part 16

Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses, who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No. 1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian hands or to Italian necks?

When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.

Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are _listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.

Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to say something.

AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.

Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has, like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are _ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few _epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_ (inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds, only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in _long_ ones.

A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says _Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore, wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne, fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton, Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.

_End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom enjoyed in Despotisms_.

The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter and more serious than the former has been.

Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.

The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....

When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction, as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...

Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said, when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank, the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."

But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls, hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed, on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul, which finds no place in the Court-almanac....

This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the _arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_, &c.

When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new court, take 4½ paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last, the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves. Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets, buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personæ_, among whom, unfortunately, I see the apothecary Zeusel.

We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into the presence of the Regent and Patient.

No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms. Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites; a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her breast.

Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats, runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for the trouble to write--

Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction; namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an undressing.

_End of the Benefit-Comedy_.

I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government, which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once, from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....

My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray, and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture, with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials.... My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair, and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."

While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop. Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one, offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well; if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.

He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before." Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily, for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the _shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she requested to have brought over to her.

He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133]

"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_ lady reader think?

She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court. Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called [Greek: kadiskon].[136]

Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a _barrière-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall. Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which, thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow, as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137] "Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams; betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine, ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this. It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and _side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and composure.

At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers, baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his "Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:

"Here, by this ring, you see, Father, Son, Spirit, three, Make one sole Deity."