Part 16

But now I would ask, what German writer durst take it upon him to spread out and paint a large historic sheet, representing the whole of us as we went to church? Would he not require to draw the father, with swelling canonicals, moving forward slowly, devoutly, and full of emotion? Would he not have to sketch the godfather, minded this day to lend out his names, which he derived from two Apostles (John and Paul), as Julius Caesar lent out his names to two things still living even now (to a month and a throne)?--And must he not put the godson on his sheet, with whom even the Emperor Joseph (in his need of nurse-milk) might become a foster-brother, in his old days, if he were still in them?--

In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ--an honor never paid to any other child in Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as to-day; and as good an angel as to-day, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[65] and all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and cramp himself erelong more harshly in the strait arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies, and errors, and sins; of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the describing of the baptism be over for to-day, and proceed again to-morrow....

FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

Oh, so it is ever! So does Fate set fire to the theatre of our little plays, and our bright-painted curtain of Futurity! So does the Serpent of Eternity wind round us and our joys, and crush, like the royal-snake, what it does not poison! Thou good Fixlein!--Ah! last night, I little thought that thou, mild soul, while I was writing beside thee, wert already journeying into the poisonous Earth-shadow of Death.

Last night, late as it was, he opened the lead box found in the old steeple-ball; a catalogue of those who had subscribed to the last repairing of the church was there; and he began to read it now; my presence and his occupations having prevented him before. O, how shall I tell that the record of his birth-year, which I had hidden in the new Ball, was waiting for him in the old one; that in the register of contributions he found his father's name, with the appendage, "given for his new-born son Egidius?"--

This stroke sunk deep into his bosom, even to the rending of it asunder; in this warm hour, full of paternal joy, after such fair days, after such fair employments, after dread of death so often survived, here, in the bright, smooth sea, which is rocking and bearing him along, starts snorting, from the bottomless abyss, the sea-monster Death; and the monster's throat yawns wide, and the silent sea rushes into it in whirlpools, and hurries him along with it.

But the patient man, quietly and slowly, and with a heart silent, though deadly cold, laid the leaves together; looked softly and firmly over the churchyard, where, in the moonshine, the grave of his father was to be distinguished; gazed timidly up to the sky, full of stars, which a white overarching laurel-tree screened from his sight;--and though he longed to be in bed, to settle there and sleep it off, yet he paused at the window to pray for his wife and child, in case this night were his last.

At this moment the steeple-clock struck twelve; but, from the breaking of a pin, the weights kept rolling down, and the clock-hammer struck without stopping,--and he heard with horror the chains and wheels rattling along; and he felt as if Death were hurling forth in a heap all the longer hours which he might yet have had to live,--and now, to his eyes, the churchyard began to quiver and heave, the moonlight flickered on the church-windows, and in the church there were lights flitting to and fro, and in the charnel-house was a motion and a tumult.

His heart fainted within him, and he threw himself into bed, and closed his eyes that he might not see;--but Imagination in the gloom now blew aloft the dust of the dead, and whirled it into giant shapes, and chased these hollow, fever-born masks alternately into lightning and shadow. Then at last from transparent thoughts grew colored visions, and he dreamed this dream. He was standing at the window looking out into the churchyard; and Death, in size as a scorpion, was creeping over it, and seeking for his bones. Death found some arm-bones and thigh-bones on the graves, and said, "They are my bones"; and he took a spine and the bone-legs, and stood with them, and the two arm-bones and clutched with them, and found on the grave of Fixlein's father a skull, and put it on. Then he lifted a scythe beside the little flower-garden, and cried: "Fixlein, where art thou? My finger is an icicle and no finger, and I will tap on thy heart with it." The Skeleton, thus piled together, now looked for him who was standing at the window, and powerless to stir from it; and carried in the one hand, instead of a sand-glass, the ever-striking steeple-clock, and held out the finger of ice, like a dagger, far into the air....

Then he saw his victim above at the window, and raised himself as high as the laurel-tree to stab straight into his bosom with the finger,--and stalked towards him. But as he came nearer, his pale bones grew redder, and vapors floated woolly round his haggard form. Flowers started up from the ground; and he stood transfigured and without the clamm of the grave, hovering above them, and the balm-breath from the flower-cups wafted him gently on;--and as he came nearer, the scythe and clock were gone, and in his bony breast he had a heart, and on his bony head red lips;--and nearer still, there gathered on him soft, transparent, rosebalm-dipped flesh, like the splendor of an Angel flying hither from the starry blue;--and close at hand, he was an Angel with shut snow-white eyelids....

The heart of my friend, quivering like a Harmonica-bell, now melted in bliss in his clear bosom;--and when the Angel opened its eyes, his were pressed together by the weight of celestial rapture, and his dream fled away.----

But not his life; he opened his hot eyes, and--his good wife had hold of his feverish hand, and was standing in room of the Angel.

The fever abated towards morning; but the certainty of dying still throbbed in every artery of the hapless man. He called for his fair little infant into his sick-bed, and pressed it silently, though it began to cry, too hard against his paternal, heavy-laden breast. Then towards noon his soul became cool, and the sultry thunder-clouds within it drew back. And here he described to us the previous (as it were, arsenical) fantasies of his usually quiet head. But it is even those tense nerves, which have not quivered at the touch of a poetic hand striking them to melody of sorrow, that start and fly asunder more easily under the fierce hand of Fate, when with sweeping stroke it smites into discord the firm-set strings.

But towards night his ideas again began rushing in a torch-dance, like fire-pillars round his soul; every artery became a burning-rod, and the heart drove flaming naphtha-brooks into the brain. All within his soul grew bloody; the blood of his drowned brother united itself with the blood which had once flowed from Thiennette's arm, into a bloody rain;--he still thought he was in the garden in the night of betrothment, he still kept calling for bandages to stanch blood, and was for hiding his head in the ball of the steeple. Nothing afflicts one more than to see a reasonable, moderate man, who has been so even in his passions, raving in the poetic madness of fever. And yet if nothing save this mouldering corruption can soothe the hot brain; and if, while the reek and thick vapor of a boiling nervous-spirit and the hissing water-spouts of the veins are encircling and eclipsing the stifled soul, a higher Finger presses through the cloud, and suddenly lifts the poor bewildered spirit from amid the smoke to a sun,--is it more just to complain, than to reflect that Fate is like the oculist, who, when about to open to a blind eye the world of light, first bandages and darkens the other eye that sees?

But the sorrow does affect me, which I read on Thiennette's pale lips, though do not hear. It is not the distortion of an excruciating agony, nor the burning of a dried-up eye, nor the loud lamenting or violent movement of a tortured frame, that I see in her; but what I am forced to see in her, and what too keenly cuts the sympathizing heart, is a pale, still, unmoved, undistorted face, a pale, bloodless head, which Sorrow is as it were holding up after the stroke, like a head just severed by the axe of the headsman; for oh! on this form the wounds, from which the three-edged dagger had been drawn, are all fallen firmly together, and the blood is flowing from them in secret into the choking heart. O Thiennette, go away from the sick-bed, and hide that face which is saying to us: "Now do I know that I shall not have any happiness on Earth; now do I give over hoping,--would this life were but soon done!"

You will not comprehend my sympathy, if you know not what, some hours ago, the too loud lamenting mother told me. Thiennette, who of old had always trembled for his thirty-second year, had encountered this superstition with a nobler one; she had purposely stood farther back at the marriage-altar, and in the bridal-night fallen sooner asleep than he; thereby--as is the popular belief--so to order it that she might also die sooner. Nay, she has determined, if he die, to lay with his corpse a piece of her apparel, that so she may descend the sooner to keep him company in his narrow house. Thou good, thou faithful wife, but thou unhappy one!--

CHAPTER LAST.

I have left Hukelum, and my gossip his bed; and the one is as sound as the other. The cure was as foolish as the malady. It first occurred to me, that, as Boerhaave used to remedy convulsions by convulsions, one fancy might in my gossip's case be remedied by another; namely, by the fancy that he was yet no man of thirty-two, but only a man of six or nine. Deliriums are dreams not encircled by sleep; and all dreams transport us back into youth, why not deliriums too? I accordingly directed every one to leave the patient; only his mother, while the fiercest meteors were darting, hissing before his fevered soul, was to sit down by him alone, and speak to him as if he were a child of eight years. The bed-mirror also I directed her to cover. She did so; she spoke to him as if he had the small-pox fever; and when he cried, "Death is standing with two-and-thirty pointed teeth before me, to eat my heart," she said to him, "Little dear, I will give thee thy roller-hat, and thy copy-book, and thy case, and thy hussar-cloak again, and more too if thou wilt be good." A reasonable speech he would have taken up and heeded much less than he did this foolish one.

At last she said,--for to women in the depth of sorrow dissimulation becomes easy,--"Well, I will try it this once, and give thee thy playthings; but do the like again, thou rogue, and roll thyself about in the bed so, with the smallpox on thee!" And with this, from her full apron she shook out on the bed the whole stock of playthings and dressing-ware, which I had found in the press of the drowned brother. First of all his copy-book, where Egidius in his eighth year had put down his name, which he necessarily recognized as his own handwriting; then the black velvet _fall-hat_ or roller-cap; then the red and white leading-strings; his knife-case, with a little pamphlet of tin leaves; his green hussar-cloak, with its stiff facings; and a whole _orbis pictus_ or _fictus_ of Nuernberg puppets....

The sick man recognized in a moment these projecting peaks of a spring-world sunk in the stream of Time,--these half shadows, this dusk of down-gone days,--this conflagration-place and Golgotha of a heavenly time, which none of us forgets, which we love forever, and look back to even from the grave.... And when he saw all this, he slowly turned round his head, as if he were awakening from a long, heavy dream; and his whole heart flowed down in warm showers of tears, and he said, fixing his full eyes on the eyes of his mother: "But are my father and brother still living then?"--"They are dead lately," said the wounded mother; but her heart was overpowered, and she turned away her eyes, and bitter tears fell unseen from her down-bent head. And now at once that evening, when he lay confined to bed by the death of his father, and was cured by his playthings, overflowed his soul with splendor and lights, and presence of the Past.

And so Delirium dyed for itself rosy wings in the Aurora of life, and fanned the panting soul,--and shook down golden butterfly-dust from its plumage on the path, on the flowerage of the suffering man;--in the far distance rose lovely tones, in the distance floated lovely clouds--O his heart was like to fall in pieces, but only into fluttering flower-stamina, into soft sentient nerves; his eyes were like to melt away, but only into dew-drops for the cups of joy-blossoms, into blood-drops for loving hearts; his soul was floating, palpitating, drinking, and swimming in the warm, relaxing rose-perfume of the brightest delusion....

The rapture bridled his feverish heart; and his mad pulse grew calm. Next morning his mother, when she saw that all was prospering, would have had the church-bells rung, to make him think that the second Sunday was already here. But his wife (perhaps out of shame in my presence) was averse to the lying; and said it would be all the same if we moved the month-hand of his clock (but otherwise than Hezekiah's Dial) eight days forward; especially as he was wont rather to rise and look at his clock for the day of the month, then to turn it up in the almanac. I for my own part simply went up to the bedside, and asked him: "If he was cracked--what in the world he meant with his mad death-dreams, when he had lain so long, and passed clean over the Cantata-Sunday, and yet, out of sheer terror, was withering to a lath?"

A glorious reinforcement joined me; the Flesher or Quartermaster. In his anxiety, he rushed into the room, without saluting the women, and I forthwith addressed him aloud: "My gossip here is giving me trouble enough, Mr. Regiments-Quartermaster; last night, he let them persuade him he was little older than his own son; here is the child's fall-hat he was for putting on." The Guardian deuced and devilled, and said: "Ward, are you a parson or a fool?--Have not I told you twenty times, there was a maggot in your head about this?"--

At last he himself perceived that he was not rightly wise, and so grew better; besides the guardian's invectives, my oaths contributed a good deal; for I swore I would hold him as no right gossip, and edit no word of his Biography, unless he rose directly and got better....

--In short, he showed so much politeness to me that he rose and got better.--He was still sickly, it is true, on Saturday; and on Sunday could not preach a sermon (something of the sort the Schoolmaster read, instead); but yet he took Confessions on Saturday, and at the altar next day he dispensed the Sacrament. Service ended, the feast of his recovery was celebrated, my farewell-feast included; for I was to go in the afternoon.

This last afternoon I will chalk out with all possible breadth, and then, with the pentagraph of free garrulity, fill up the outline and draw on the great scale.

During the Thanksgiving-repast, there arrived considerable personal tribute from his catechumens, and fairings by way of bonfire for his recovery; proving how much the people loved him, and how well he deserved it; for one is oftener hated without reason by the many, than without reason loved by them. But Fixlein was friendly to every child; was none of those clergy who never pardon their enemies except in--God's stead; and he praised at once the whole world, his wife, and himself.

I then attended at his afternoon's catechizing; and looked down (as he did in the first Letter-Box) from the choir, under the wing of the wooden cherub. Behind this angel, I drew out my note-book, and shifted a little under the cover of the Black Board, with its white Psalm-ciphers,[66] and wrote down what I was there--thinking. I was well aware, that when I to-day, on the twenty-fifth of May retired from this _Salernic_[67] spinning-school, where one is taught to spin out the thread of life, in fairer wise, and without wetting it by foreign mixtures,--I was well aware, I say, that I should carry off with me far more elementary principles of the Science of Happiness than the whole Chamberlain piquet ever muster all their days. I noted down my first impression, in the following Rules of Life for myself and the press.

"Little joys refresh us constantly like house-bread, and never bring disgust; and great ones, like sugar-bread, briefly, and then bring it.--Trifles we should let, not plague us only, but also gratify us; we should seize not their poison-bags only, but their honey-bags also; and if flies often buzz about our room, we should, like Domitian, amuse ourselves with flies, or, like a certain still living Elector,[68] feed them.--For _civic_ life and its micrologies, for which the Parson has a natural taste, we must acquire an artificial one; must learn to love without esteeming it; learn, far as it ranks beneath _human_ life, to enjoy it like another twig of this human life, as poetically as we do the pictures of it in romances. The loftiest mortal loves and seeks the _same sort_ of things with the meanest; only from higher grounds and by higher paths. Be every minute, Man, a full life to thee!--Despise anxiety and wishing, the Future and the Past!--If the _Second-pointer_ can be no road-pointer into an Eden for thy soul, the _Month-pointer_ will still less be so, for thou livest not from month to month, but from second to second! Enjoy thy Existence more than thy Manner of Existence, and let the dearest object of thy Consciousness be this Consciousness itself!--Make not the Present a means of thy Future; for this Future is nothing but a coming Present; and the Present, which thou despisest, was once a Future which thou desiredst!--Stake in no lotteries,--keep at home,--give and accept no pompous entertainments,--travel not abroad every year!--Conceal not from thyself, by long plans, thy household goods, thy chamber, thy acquaintance!--Despise Life, that thou mayst enjoy it!--Inspect the neighborhood of thy life; every shelf, every nook of thy abode; and nestling in, quarter thyself in the farthest and most domestic winding of thy snail-house!--Look upon a capital but as a collection of villages, a village as some blind-alley of a capital; fame as the talk of neighbors at the street-door; a library as a learned conversation, joy as a second, sorrow as a minute, life as a day; and three things as all in all: God, Creation, Virtue!"----

And if I would follow myself and these rules, it will behoove me not to make so much of this Biography; but once for all, like a moderate man, to let it sound out.

After the Catechizing, I stept down to my wide-gowned and black-gowned gossip. The congregation gone, we clambered up to all high places, perused the plates on the pews--I took a lesson on the altar on its inscription incrusted with the _sediment of Time_ (I speak not metaphorically); I organed, my gossip managing the bellows; I mounted the pulpit, and was happy enough there to alight on one other rose-shoot, which in the farewell minute, I could still plant in the rose-garden of my Fixlein. For I descried aloft, on the back of a wooden Apostle, the name _Lavater_, which the Zurich Physiognomist had been pleased to leave on this sacred Torso in the course of his wayfaring. Fixlein did not know the hand, but I did, for I had seen it frequently in Flachsenfingen, not only on the tapestry of a Court Lady there, but also in his _Hand-Library_;[69] and met with it besides in many country churches, forming, as it were, the Directory and Address-Calendar of this wandering name, for Lavater likes to inscribe in pulpits, as a shepherd does in trees, the name of his beloved. I could now advise my gossip prudently to cut away the name, with the chip of wood containing it, from the back of the Apostle, and to preserve it carefully among his _curiosa_.

On returning to the parsonage, I made for my hat and stick; but the design, as it were the projection and contour of a supper in the acacia-grove, had already been sketched by Thiennette. I declared that I would stay till evening, in case the young mother went out with us to the proposed meal.... and truly the Biographer at length got his way, all doctors' regulations notwithstanding.