Part 9

As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks' child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw, thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying, meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates. Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then, _auto-da-fés_ also?"

I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious mood stand so near to our mirthful.

Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks, to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders (_circularia_) do.

In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again, or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones, which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew, opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm, quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits, graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."

But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus, how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round, and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then, how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising, and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far from the grave, and hopes here below no more.

To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year, went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_ creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long, horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but stiffened statues?

After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree, out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations: "Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.

The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged as others, if she _had_ children or milk....

Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle, which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....

It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the tide,--all is rehabilitated.

But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy, waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man's boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink) that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....

But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold assaf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with a woodman's axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be on my account, regularly out of his senses.

Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of _me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth, like ribbons from a juggler's,--what would it avail me?

Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner to wit:--

I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns, from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no narrative.

II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia juris_--_restitutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem læsionis enormis et enormissimæ_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress of St. John's, May 4, 1793.

Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground of decision.

7. DOG-POST-DAY.

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

His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse, must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact, these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay therein sixty years.--

The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden, particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand, but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines, unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden, and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the garden."

Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness, make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty. Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a continued family-room without roof or partition.

As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit, that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Göttingen,--"every good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends, brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too; and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then, oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing, cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love? Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously, and--then fall down again."

At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her, had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly, he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree, and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him. Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of 45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped back from the bewildering orangery.