Part 17

The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly, before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers. This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds. Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the _threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.

Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such second-telling watches indicate and strike.

--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still sitting there.

The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.

I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda; she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her recruiting-license.

But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?

1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days, reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards, coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an _associée_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour) quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_, and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is, if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_ for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious; else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of adopted childhood.

To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_ capital, made more rare, hold out three years.

2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness. An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will," he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is _right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."

Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears, which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh Chapter....

12. DOG-POST-DAY.

Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.

We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day. Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only enlighten the world."

Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage, because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.

Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head and listen to the inner buzzing.

"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator: the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring, which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried. They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St. Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face; by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her, now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say, Whither away, my friend?"--

"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village. Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to think of her.

The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.

The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday matters are to be recorded.

His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one, which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and, painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has worked, here!--

Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl, and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic island.

What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein. Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow, formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to pieces overhead by their contact.

As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed, kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming, conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son felt every sensation repeated in himself.

"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."

His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by frost.

He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy, then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.

"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not, my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no more the old breast, full as it may be."

Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see, because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--

He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and from him thou must conceal it."

Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely, they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"

"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.

"But in case--?"

"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--

Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.

He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his Lordship's return.