Part 17

I then constrained the Parson to put on his Kraeutermuetze,[70] or Herb-cap, which he had stitched together out of simples for the strengthening of his memory: "Would to Heaven," said I, "that Princes instead of their Princely Hats, Doctors and Cardinals instead of theirs, and Saints instead of martyr-crowns, would clap such memory-bonnets on their heads!"--Thereupon, till the roasting and cooking within doors were over, we marched out alone over the parsonage meadows, and talked of learned matters, we packed ourselves into the ruined Robber-Castle, on which my gossip, as already mentioned, has a literary work in hand. I deeply approved, the rather as this Kidnapper-tower had once belonged to an Aufhammer, his intention of dedicating the description to the Rittmeister; that nobleman, I think, will sooner give his name to the Book than to the Shock. For the rest, I exhorted my fellow-craftsman to pluck up literary heart, and said to him: "A fearless pen, good gossip! Let Subrector Hans von Fuechslein be, if he like, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, lying in wait for the delivery of the fugitive Woman, to swallow the offspring; I am there too, and have my friend the Editor of the _Litteraturzeitung_ at my side, who will gladly permit me to give an _anticritique_ on paying the insertion-dues!"--I especially excited him to new fillings and return-freights of his Letter-Boxes. I have not taken oath that into this biographical chest-of-drawers I will not in the course of time introduce another Box. "Neither to my godson, worthy gossip, will it do any harm that he is presented, poor child, even now to the reading public, when he does not count more months than, as Horace will have it, a literary child should count years, namely, _nine_."

In walking homewards, I praised his wife. "If marriage," said I to him, "is the madder which in maids, as in cotton, makes the colors visible, then I contend, that Thiennette, when a maid, could scarcely be so good as she is now when a wife. By Heaven! in such a marriage, I should write Books of quite another sort, divine ones; in a marriage, I mean, where beside the writing-table (as beside the great voting-table at the Regensburg Diets, there are little tables of confectionery); where in like manner, I say, a little jar of marmalade were standing by me, namely, a sweetened, dainty, lovely face, and out of measure fond of the Letter-Box-writer, gossip! Your marriage will resemble the acacia-grove we are now going to, the leaves of which grow thicker with the heat of summer, while other shrubs are yielding only shrunk and porous shade."

As we entered through the upper garden-door into this same bower, the supper and the good mistress were already there. Nothing is more pure and tender than the respect with which a wife treats the benefactor or comrade of her husband; and happily the Biographer himself was this comrade, and the object of this respect. Our talk was cheerful, but my spirit was oppressed. The fetters, which bind the mere reader to my heroes, were in my case of triple force; as I was at once their guest and their portrait-painter. I told the Parson that he would live to a greater age than I, for that his temperate temperament was balanced, as if by a doctor, so equally between the nervousness of refinement and the hot thick-bloodedness of the rustic. Fixlein said that if he lived but as long as he had done, namely, two-and-thirty years, it would amount, exclusive of the leap-year-days, to 280,320 seconds, which in itself was something considerable; and that he often reckoned up with satisfaction the many thousand persons of his own age that would have a life equally long.

At last I tried to get in motion; for the red lights of the falling sun were mounting up over the grove, and dipping us still deeper in the shadows of night; the young mother had grown chill in the evening dew. In confused mood, I invited the Parson to visit me soon in the city, where I would show him not only all the chambers of the Palace, but the Prince himself. Gladder there was nothing this day on our old world than the face to which I said so; and than the other one which was the mild reflection of the former.--For the Biographer it would have been too hard, if now in that minute, when his fancy, like mirror-telescopes, was representing every object in a _tremulous_ form, he had been obliged to cut and run; if, I will say, it had not occurred to him that to the young mother it could do little harm (but much good) were she to take a short walk, and assist in escorting the Author and architect of the present Letter-Box out of the garden to his road.

In short, I took this couple one in each hand, instead of under each arm, and moved with them through the garden to the Flachsenfingen highway. I often abruptly turned round my head between them, as if I had heard some one coming after us; but in reality I only meant once more, though mournfully, to look back into the happy hamlet, whose houses were all dwellings of contented still Sabbath-joy, and which is happy enough, though over its wide-parted pavement-stones there passes every week but one barber, every holiday but one dresser of hair, and every year but one hawker of parasols. Then truly I had again to turn round my head, and look at the happy pair beside me. My otherwise affectionate gossip could not rightly suit himself to these tokens of sorrow; but in thy heart, thou good, so oft afflicted sex, every mourning-bell soon finds its unison; and Thiennette, ennobled with the thin trembling _resonance_ of a reverberating soul, gave me back all my tones with the beauties of an echo.---- At last we reached the boundary, over which Thiennette could not be allowed to walk; and now must I part from my gossip, with whom I had talked so gayly every morning (each of us from his bed), and from the still circuit of modest hope where he dwelt, and return once more to the rioting, fermenting Court-sphere, where men in bull-beggar tone demand from Fate a root of Life-Licorice, thick as the arm, like the botanical one on the Wolga, not so much that they may chew the sweet bean themselves, as fell others to earth with it.

As I thought to myself that I would say, Farewell! to them, all the coming plagues, all the corpses, and all the marred wishes of this good pair, arose before my heart; and I remembered that little, save the falling asleep of joy-flowers, would mark the current of their Life-day, as it does of mine and of every one's.--And yet is it fairer, if they measure their years not by the _Water-clock_ of falling tears, but by the _Flower-clock_[71] of asleep-going flowers, whose bells in our short-lived garden are sinking together before us from hour to hour.--

I would even now--for I still recollect how I hung with streaming eyes over these two loved ones, as over their corpses--address myself, and say: Far too soft, _Jean Paul_, whose chalk still sketches the models of Nature on a ground of Melancholy; harden thy heart like thy frame, and waste not thyself and others by such thoughts. Yet why should I do it, why should I not confess directly what, in the softest emotion, I said to these two beings? "May all go right with you, ye mild beings," I said, for I no longer thought of courtesies, "may the arm of Providence bear gently your lacerated hearts, and the good Father, above all these suns which are now looking down on us, keep you ever united, and exalt you still undivided to his bosom and his lips!" "Be you, too, right happy and glad!" said Thiennette. "And to you, Thiennette," continued I, "Ah! to your pale cheeks, to your oppressed heart, to your long cold maltreated youth, I can never, never wish enough. No! But all that can soothe a wounded soul, that can please a pure one, that can still the hidden sigh--O, all that you deserve--may this be given you; and when you see me again, then say to me, 'I am now much happier!'"

We were all of us too deeply moved. We at last tore ourselves asunder from repeated embraces; my friend retired with the soul whom he loves,--I remained alone behind him with the Night.

And I walked without aim through woods, through valleys, and over brooks, and through sleeping villages, to enjoy the great Night like a Day. I walked, and still looked like the magnet to the region of midnight, to strengthen my heart at the gleaming twilight, at this upstretching Aurora of a morning beneath our feet. White night-butterflies flitted, white blossoms fluttered, white stars fell, and the white snow-powder hung silvery in the high Shadow of the Earth, which reaches beyond the Moon, and which is our Night. Then began the AEolian Harp of the Creation to tremble and to sound, blown on from above, and my immortal soul was a string in this Harp.--The heart of a brother everlasting Man swelled under the everlasting Heaven, as the seas swell under the Sun and under the Moon.--The distant village-clocks struck midnight, mingling, as it were, with the ever-pealing tone of ancient Eternity.--The limbs of my buried ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.--I walked silently through little hamlets, and close by their outer churchyards, where crumbled upcast coffin-boards were glimmering, while the once bright eyes that had lain in them were mouldered into gray ashes.--Cold thought! clutch not like a cold spectre at my heart; I look up to the starry sky, and an everlasting chain stretches thither, and over and below; and all is Life, and Warmth, and Light, and all is godlike or God....

Towards morning I descried thy late lights, little city of my dwelling, which I belong to on this side the grave; I return to the Earth; and in thy steeples, behind the by-advanced great Midnight, it struck half past two; about this hour, in 1794, Mars went down in the west, and the Moon rose in the east; and my soul desired, in grief for the noble warlike blood which is still streaming on the blossoms of Spring: "Ah, retire, bloody War, like red Mars; and thou, still Peace, come forth like the mild divided Moon!"--

ARMY-CHAPLAIN SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ;

WITH

A RUNNING COMMENTARY OF NOTES.

TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

PREFACE

This, I conceive, may be managed in two words. The _first_ word must relate to the Circular Letter of Army-Chaplain Schmelzle, wherein he describes to his friends his Journey to the metropolitan city of Flaetz; after having, in an Introduction, premised some proofs and assurances of his valor. Properly speaking, the _Journey_ itself has been written purely with a view that his courageousness, impugned by rumor, may be fully evinced and demonstrated by the plain facts which he therein records. Whether, in the mean time, there shall not be found certain quick-scented readers, who may infer, directly contrariwise, that his breast is not everywhere bomb-proof, especially in the left side,--on this point I keep my judgment suspended.

For the rest, I beg the judges of literature, as well as their satellites, the critics of literature, to regard this _Journey_, for whose literary contents I, as Editor, am answerable, solely in the light of a Portrait (in the French sense), a little Sketch of Character. It is a voluntary or involuntary comedy-piece, at which I have laughed so often, that I purpose in time coming to paint some similar Pictures of Character myself. And, for the present, when could such a little comic toy be more fitly imparted and set forth to the world than in these very days, when the sound both of heavy money and of light laughter has died away from among us,--when, like the Turks, we count and pay merely with sealed _purses_, and the coin within them has vanished?

Despicable would it seem to me, if any clownish squire of the goose-quill should publicly and censoriously demand of me in what way this self-cabinet-piece of Schmelzle's has come into my hands. I know it well, and do not disclose it. This comedy-piece, for which I, at all events, as my Bookseller will testify, draw the profit myself, I got hold of so unblamably, that I await, with unspeakable composure, what the Army-Chaplain shall please to say against the publication of it, in case he say anything at all. My conscience bears me witness, that I acquired this article at least by more honorable methods than are those of the learned persons who steal with their ears, who, in the character of spiritual auditory-thieves, and class-room cut-purses and pirates, are in the habit of disloading their plundered Lectures, and vending them up and down the country as productions of their own. Hitherto, in my whole life, I have stolen little, except now and then in youth some--glances.

The _second_ word must explain or apologize for the singular form of this little Work, standing as it does on a substratum of Notes. I myself am not contented with it. Let the world open, and look, and determine, in like manner. But the truth is, this line of demarcation, stretching through the whole book, originated in the following accident: certain thoughts (or digressions) of my own, with which it was not permitted me to disturb those of the Army-Chaplain, and which could only be allowed to fight behind the lines, in the shape of Notes, I, with a view to conveniency and order, had written down in a separate paper; at the same time, as will be observed, regularly providing every Note with its Number, and thus referring it to the proper page of the main Manuscript. But, in the copying of the latter, I had forgotten to insert the corresponding numbers in the Text itself. Therefore, let no man, any more than I do, cast a stone at my worthy Printer, inasmuch as he (perhaps in the thought that it was my way, that I had some purpose in it) took these Notes, just as they stood, pellmell, without arrangement of Numbers, and clapped them under the Text; at the same time, by a praiseworthy, artful computation, taking care, at least, that at the bottom of every page in the Text there should some portion of this glittering Note-precipitate make its appearance. Well, the thing at any rate is done, nay, perpetuated, namely, printed. After all, I might almost partly rejoice at it. For, in good truth, had I meditated for years (as I have done for the last twenty) how to provide for my digression-comets new orbits, if not focal suns, for my episodes new epopees,--I could scarce possibly have hit upon a better or more spacious Limbo for such Vanities than Chance and Printer here accidentally offer me ready-made. I have only to regret that the thing has been printed before I could turn it to account. Heavens! what remotest allusions (had I known it before printing) might not have been privily introduced in every Text-page and Note-number; and what apparent incongruity in the real congruity between this upper and under side of the cards! How vehemently and devilishly might one not have cut aloft, and to the right and left, from these impregnable casemates and covered-ways; and what _laesio ultra dimidium_ (injury beyond the half of the Text) might not, with these satirical injuries, have been effected and completed!

But Fate meant not so kindly with me; of this golden harvest-field of satire I was not to be informed till three days before the Preface.

Perhaps, however, the writing world, by the little blue flame of this accident, may be guided to a weightier acquisition, to a larger subterranean treasure, than I, alas! have dug up. For, to the writer, there is now a way pointed out of producing in one marbled volume a group of altogether different works; of writing in one leaf, for both sexes at the same time, without confounding them, nay, for the five faculties all at once, without disturbing their limitations; since now, instead of boiling up a vile, fermenting shove-together, fit for nobody, he has nothing to do but draw his note-lines or partition-lines; and so on his five-story leaf give board and lodging to the most discordant heads. Perhaps one might then read many a book for the fourth time, simply because every time one had read but a fourth part of it.

On the whole, this Work has at least the property of being a short one; so that the reader, I hope, may almost run through it, and read it at the bookseller's counter, without, as in the case of thicker volumes, first needing to buy it. And why, indeed, in this world of Matter should anything whatever be great, except only what belongs not to it, the world of Spirit?

Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

_Bayreuth, in the Bay and Peace Month_, 1707.

SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ.

_Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor_ Attila Schmelzle _to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays' Journey to Flaetz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and his Courage as former Army-Chaplain_.

Nothing can be more ludicrous, my esteemed Friends, than to hear people stigmatizing a man as cowardly and hare-hearted, who perhaps is struggling all the while with precisely the opposite faults, those of a lion; though indeed the African lion himself, since the time of Sparrmann's Travels, passes among us for poltroon. Yet this case is mine, worthy Friends; and I purpose to say a few words thereupon, before describing my journey.

108. Good princes easily obtain good subjects; not so easily good subjects good princes; thus Adam, in the state of innocence, ruled over animals all tame and gentle, till simply through his means they fell and grew savage.

You in truth are all aware that, directly in the teeth of this calumny, it is courage, it is desperadoes (provided they be not braggarts and tumultuous persons), whom I chiefly venerate; for example, my brother-in-law, the Dragoon, who never in his life bastinadoed one man, but always a whole social circle at the same time. How truculent was my fancy, even in childhood, when I, as the parson was toning away to the silent congregation, used to take it into my head: "How now, if thou shouldst start up from thy pew, and shout aloud, I am here too, Mr. Parson!" and to paint out this thought in such glowing colors, that, for very dread, I have often been obliged to leave the church! Anything like Rugenda's battle-pieces; horrid murder-tumults, sea-fights or Stormings of Toulon, exploding fleets; and, in my childhood, Battles of Prague on the harpsichord; nay, in short, every map of any remarkable scene of war; these are perhaps too much my favorite objects; and I read--and purchase nothing sooner; and doubtless they might lead me into many errors, were it not that my circumstances restrain me. Now, if it be objected that true courage is something higher than mere thinking and willing, then you, my worthy friends, will be the first to recognize mine, when it shall break forth into not barren and empty, but active and effective words, while I strengthen my future Catechetical Pupils, as well as can be done in a course of College Lectures, and steel them into Christian heroes.

5. For a good Physician saves, if not always from the disease, at least from a bad Physician.

It is well known that, out of care for the preservation of my life, I never walk within at least ten fields of any shore full of bathers or swimmers; merely because I foresee to a certainty, that, in case one of them were drowning, I should that moment (for the heart overbalances the head) plunge after the fool to save him, into some bottomless depth or other, where we should both perish. And if dreaming is the reflex of waking, let me ask you, true Hearts, if you have forgotten my relating to you dreams of mine, which no Caesar, no Alexander or Luther, need have felt ashamed of? Have I not, to mention a few instances, taken Rome by storm; and done battle with the Pope and the whole elephantine body of the Cardinal College, at one and the same time? Did I not once on horseback, while simply looking at a review of military, dash headlong into a _bataillon quarre_; and then capture, in Aix-la-Chapelle, the Peruke of Charlemagne, for which the town pays yearly ten reichsthalers of barber-money; and carrying it off to Halberstadt von Gleim, there in like manner seize the Great Frederick's Hat; put both Peruke and Hat on my head, and yet return home, after I had stormed their batteries and turned the cannon against the cannoneers themselves? Did I not once submit to be made a Jew of, and then be regaled with hams; though they were ape-hams on the Orinoco (see Humboldt)? And a thousand such things; for I have thrown the Consistorial President of Flaetz out of the Palace window; those alarm-fulminators, sold by Heinrich Backofen in Gotha, at six groschen the dozen, and each going off like a cannon, I have listened to so calmly that the fulminators did not even awaken me; and more of the like sort.

100. In books lie the Phoenix-ashes of a past Millennium and Paradise; but War blows, and much ashes are scattered away.

But enough! It is now time briefly to touch that further slander of my chaplainship, which unhappily has likewise gained some circulation in Flaetz, but which, as Caesar did Alexander, I shall now by my touch dissipate into dust. Be what truth in it there can, it is still little or nothing. Your great Minister and General in Flaetz (perhaps the very greatest in the world, for there are not many Schabackers) may indeed, like any other great man, be turned against me; but not with the Artillery of Truth; for this Artillery I here set before you, my good Hearts, and do you but fire it off for my advantage! The matter is this. Certain foolish rumors are afloat in the Flaetz country, that I, on occasion of some important battles, took leg-bail (such is their plebeian phrase), and that afterwards, on the Chaplain's being called for to preach a Thanksgiving sermon for the victory, no chaplain whatever was to be found. The ridiculousness of this story will best appear, when I tell you that I never was in any action; but have always been accustomed, several hours prior to such an event, to withdraw so many miles to the rear, that our men, so soon as they were beaten, would be sure to find me. A good retreat is reckoned the masterpiece in the art of war; and at no time can a retreat be executed with such order, force, and security as just before the battle, when you are not yet beaten.

102. Dear Political or Religious Inquisitor! Art thou aware that Turin tapers never rightly begin shining till thou breakest them, and then they take fire?

It is true, I might perhaps, as expectant Professor of Catechetics, sit still and smile at such nugatory speculations on my courage; for if by Socratic questioning I can hammer my future Catechist Pupils into the habit of asking questions in their turn, I shall thereby have tempered _them_ into heroes, seeing they have nothing to fight with but children--(Catechists at all events, though dreading fire, have no reason to dread light, since in our days, as in London illuminations, it is only the _unlighted_ windows that are battered in; whereas, in other ages, it was with nations and light as it is with dogs and water; if you give them none for a long time, they at last get a horror at it);--and on the whole, for Catechists, any park looks kindlier, and smiles more sweetly, than a sulphurous park of artillery; and the Warlike Foot, which the age is placed on, is to them the true Devil's cloven-foot of human nature.

86. Very true! In youth we love and enjoy the most ill-assorted friends, perhaps more than, in old age, the best assorted.