Part 2

"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest, and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----

Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star, which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings, and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become brothers?--

Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the _moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves, some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow too old, then comfort me also!

Hof, May 16, 1797.

PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.

PREFACE.

I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle, and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even, of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great, thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle, and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild, masculine ones.----

But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up, that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries, and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--

But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.

As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore present only the

First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days," until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the

Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable little human bodies; and the

Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have only once. And finally the

Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]

CONCLUSION.

And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have completed thy orbit!—Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star, never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of _this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus, thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed, which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms, disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----

Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again, because he has lost nothing but sleep.--

The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new men.--

And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10] stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----

Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--

But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their antics; the living dream.

JEAN PAUL. In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

1. DOG-POST-DAY.

Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.-- Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.

2. DOG-POST-DAY.

Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.

3. DOG-POST-DAY.

Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.

4. DOG-POST-DAY.

Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble Man.

5. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.

6. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.-- Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.

7. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.

8. DOG-POST-DAY.

Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First Intercalary Day.

9. DOG-POST-DAY.

A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a Bed without a House.

10. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.

11. DOG-POST-DAY.

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

12. DOG-POST-DAY.

Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third Intercalary Day.

13. DOG-POST-DAY.

Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.-- Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.

14. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's Confessions.

15. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Parting.

16. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary Day.

17. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.-- Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.

18. DOG-POST-DAY.

Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the Flachsenfingeners.

19. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.

20. DOG-POST-DAY.

Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.

21. DOG-POST-DAY.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

22. DOG-POST-DAY.

Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks, and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.-- Giulia's dying Epistle.

23. DOG-POST-DAY.

First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The Race-Weeks.

24. DOG-POST-DAY.

Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.

HESPERUS,

OR

45 DOG-POST-DAYS.

1. DOG-POST-DAY.

Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.-- Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.-- Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.

In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.

The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been _one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally, of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too many houses off from her, as food for her heart.

The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel (Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it, if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!

The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts. It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go, that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?... For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.

We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation _Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region, and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly, he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father, however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he _sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen, who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people, to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of Göttingen?

His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.

We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters, drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism, post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.

But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women, who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design. In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it, one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed, is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part, and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.