Part 13

"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure, and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended) without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of coarse natures, that cannot guess the hidden gratitude and the dumb joy, they are forced to assume hypocritically not the feeling but the expression of it. Beata's father demands for every present he makes, whose value he weighs even to an apothecary's grain, an exultant and exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice, what I have often before, that woman's body and soul are too tender and excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion, and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in the fifth act herself die with the hero.

"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true, the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile, and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister's lady, that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has Oefel's heart already _hooked_ or _eyed_ to her charms; but the devil trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee, whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly, art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it; for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could please (_if he pleased_), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a courtier, and buys with another's favor only his own. I will console thee with still more 'it is true's' before I bring on my 'buts.' Beata, it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I not admire him? the minster's lady looks as if she were asking _her_ every minute, 'why dost thou not envy me, when my vassal is like myself a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?'--for he keeps no one position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning, breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can now properly introduce the promised But.

"But although my fair patient overlooks him so coldly, as one who is trying on us a dress, he, however, assumes the opposite, and throws at her fire-balls to illuminate himself, and aeolypiles or smoke-balls for her obscuration, and is already, in advance, cutting mint-stamps for his future medals of victory. Men or manikins like Oefel have such a superfluity of truth, that they are obliged to give it not to one alone, but to distribute it among a thousand women; Oefel would fain command a whole female slave-ship; meanwhile he cares as little about thee as about the minister's lady, who loves him, because it is her latest lover, and whom he loves, first, because in her triumphal chariot, to which formerly a number of ninnies were harnessed, he would be glad to draw alone as thill-horse; and, secondly, she possesses more art and less feeling than he, and persuades him that it is precisely the reverse.

"That I may now weave our Beata, whom thou wouldst gladly get into thy life and into thy book, into the life and the book of Oefel (he is upon me also), for this reason, dear Paul, I have delivered so many cabinet-sermons to old Roeper to the point that the sickliness of his daughter is to be overcome not by one but by several hundred physicians, _i. e_., by society--that the old man will give her a society or rather will give her to one, without himself giving her the necessary alimony. He wants to transplant her into some bed or other of the court-garden: 'She, too, shall, with the rest, gain knowledge of the world,' he says, and has none himself. He would, if he could, drag and crush down the whole female world from its altars and pedestals and presidential chairs and regular seats to milking-stools and work-benches and foot-stools; nevertheless his own daughter shall have Jews and diamond-dust grind facettes and angles of radiance upon her, which he himself hates. Once at court, the legation-counsellor will see her every day--and Jean Paul is _nowhere_.

"This Jean Paul asked me in a sly way, whether he might not act as lawyer to the father of the aforesaid daughter, because he, said Jean, had heard of the resignation of the present one. Herr Kolb, however (the lawyer in question), is still there, and still quarrelling; says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Roeper's that I know;' while Roeper says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Kolb's that I know;' and so the two are glued together by mutual apprehensions. Besides, just now, the thing is not to be thought of; for in fourteen days old Roeper receives the oath of allegiance from his manor. A miser dreads to change or to risk anything.

"Why dost thou let thy good sister stay so long in the arsenical fumes of the court? Is what she can gain there worth as much as what she brings with her and may lose there, her pure, tender, though volatile heart? On my tours I thought otherwise, but now in solitude, a coquettish insect, a coquet-crab, creeping now forward and now backward, that keeps opening her great and little shears and always reproduces them as fast as one tear's them off, who instead of a heart carries in her breast a stomach, and yet, like all insects, is cold-blooded, such an incrusted female crab is more revolting to me than a shelless one in the moulting period of sensibility, which is too soft, and out of which romance-writers make the delicate crab-butter. Sensibility improves with years, coquetry grows worse with years. Why dost thou not take thy Philippina home? To these questions Jean Paul has vouchsafed no answer; but to his I have; for I do not take vengeance; I could wish rather the said Paul were pressing Beata's fingers to-day on wrong fingers rather than on the right keys, and that now in the spring-time of her years she looked round beseechingly beside the piano toward Paulus and illumined him with the heaven of her broad blue eyes; the poor devil, even this Paul, would no longer know himself, and would say: Without a beautiful eye, for all other beauty I would not give a doit, much less myself; but for a pair of heavenly eyes I forget all contiguous charms and all contiguous faults, and all Bach and Benda, what they are, and my mordants and the false fifths and much more. Farewell, forgetful one! Dr. Fenk."

We understand each other, hearty friend! whoever has once written satires himself can forgive all satires upon himself, especially the most malicious, only not dull ones. But, though the doctor has carried on the fight in jest, still I must inform such readers as reside at a distance from Scheerau, without reference to myself, that the aforesaid Legation-counsellor, Oefel, is the most insignificant fellow that either of us has ever known; is one who is only less embarrassed among women, but always so among men, and in a small circle far more than in a large one, not to say that he is always seeking and hunting after that attention which modest people carefully shun, namely, general attention. If he succeeds in getting this elsewhere, he shall not have it in my book.... The following case is, to be sure, impossible, especially on account of the cursed long- and short-legged or _trochaic_ supports and consoles on which my torso rests; but still a man can picture to himself the impossible case, which is this, that I should one day appear before my Beata with a declaration of love, and so, contrary to my own expectation, be myself the hero of this biography and she the heroine. I am regularly dumfounded, for what I would be really saying and supposing is that I became Roeper's lawyer, and next thing, in fact, (for I should be every court-day "sweet," or a _sweet creature_, as a woman expresses herself, who belongs more to the _fair_ than to the _weaker_ sex) absolutely his son-in-law. With pleasure would I, for the good and sympathetic reader's gratification, describe all biographically.... But as has been said, the thing is, unluckily, quite impossible, so far as I can see into the future; and this merely by reason of a cursed unsymmetrical wire-pedestal, which, to be sure, he whom his ill-fortune has fastened thereto would fain make good by a thousand glazings and rasures, and on which Epictetus likewise for a long time stood.

In the heat of my feelings I have been carried quite out of my biographical plan; it was hitherto to have been cleverly kept from the reading world (and the thing was successfully done) that none of all these adventures are yet old, and that in a short time the life of these persons will go on hand in hand simultaneously with my biography. But now I have fired off all my powder. On the whole a new section must, now be commenced, that shall contain more sense....

NINETEENTH SECTION.

Oath of Allegiance.--I, Beata, Oefel.

Fourteen days after Fenk's letter ... But are readers to be relied on? I know not how it happens with the German reader, whether from a splinter in the brain, or from an effusion of lymph, or from deadly debilitation, that he forgets every thing a writer has said, or it may come from constipation or from irregular discharges, anyhow the author has to bear the brunt of it. Thus I have already spread the information over a multitude of sheets by compositors and printers for the benefit of the reader (but to no effect), that we have 13,000 thalers in the Prince's hand, which are to come to us; that I have, it is true, never studied the Jura; that I did, nevertheless, while I was undergoing my examination as an advocate, contrive to pick up many a nice juristical crumb, which now stands me well in stead; that Gustavus is to be a cadet, and I am bent upon being a justiciary; that Ottomar is invisible and even inaudible, and that my Principal squanders too much.

Unhappily it cannot be otherwise: for so long as he knows of an apartment or a stable without cubic contents of an animal nature, he hangs out his fishing-rod for guests. Like our modern women, he is never well except in a social hurricane and a thicket of visitors; he and these women come up out of such a living _men-and-women-bath_ as rejuvenated and regenerated as out of an _ant_-and-_snail-bath_. He never can flatter himself upon having herein the least resemblance (to say no more) to the Commercial Agent Roeper, who in the solitude of a sage and a capitalist silently reflects upon house-mortgages and arrears of interest, and who knows that his castle possesses only cup and pitcher privilege,[48] and therefore no one can be entertained over night. Falkenberg, hearken to the biographer! Close now and then thy purse, thy door, and thy heart. Believe me, fate will not spare thy generous soul. Fortune in her race will run over and cut in pieces with her wheel thy soft heart, to empty her loto-wheel behind her bandage before a Roeper. O friend! he will take from thee all that thou would'st give to others' misery or thy own enjoyment, not even leaving thee the courage to bury thy shamed heart with its wounds in the bosom of a friend!--and then how will it fare with thy son?

And yet!--I blame thee only _beforehand_; but _afterward_, when thou hast one day made thyself miserable by making others happy, then wilt thou find respect in all good eyes and love in every good breast!

... Fourteen days, then, after Fenk's letter, when my pupil was already eighteen years old, but still without the position of cadet, there sat at my principal's lodgings a _bureau d'esprit_ of Bohemian noblemen, with fiery Pentecostal tongues and March beer. I had nothing to drink or to say, but made one of the company. I could never refuse my good captain, but added one, if not to the guests--(one does not begin to prize fully men of a certain too great refinement till one is away from them among men of a certain coarseness)--yet to the people. Many persons are, like him, visiting press-gangs and cannot bid people enough together, yet without knowing why or wherefore, and without any real affection for them. Falkenberg would invite the deaf and dumb. It has its consequences for my readers that I said: "To-day Roeper receives the oath of allegiance." Falkenberg, who was fond of speaking ill of others, and doing nothing but good to them, and who would gladly strew peas in the path of his absent hereditary foes, _i. e_., misers, and yet sweep them away again just as they were about to slip on them, was charmed with my idea and his own. "We must all," said he, "ride over to-day just to vex him (Roeper)." In six minutes the drinking _bureau d'esprit_ and the tutor were on their nags; but not Gustavus. He was made for a finer enthusiasm than a noisy one. Hence Gustavus's _inner life_ often involved me with his father (who demanded _outward_ life) in the tedious and useless attempt on my part to convince him wherein the exalted worth of his son properly lay. For a tutor who stands upon his honor, such a thing is too disagreeable.

We saw, as we sat on our horses, _Maussenbach_, which stood before its noble _Boyar_,[49] and placed the feudal crown on his Italian head. Beside the homage-receiving liege-lord stood his judicial department, his excise college, his privy government, his department of foreign affairs--namely, Herr Kolb, the magistrate, who represented all these colleges in his own person. This miniature ministry of the miniature sovereign stood on a meadow holding a long letter in its hand, from which it read out to the people all that was to be sworn. The hundred hands of the confederation then passed in succession through the two hardening hands of Kolb and Roeper, and promised gladly to obey the nobleman, if he, on his part, would promise to command.

But _after pleasure comes pain_, after hereditary homage a _bureau d'esprit_.... In the eighteenth century, certainly, many men have been scared, and very much so, _e. g_., the Jesuits, the aristocrats, also Voltaire and other great authors have often been considerably frightened; but no one in this whole enlightened century was ever so scared as the commercial agent when he saw what was coming; when he saw fifteen human heads and fifteen horses' heads between an artillery train of hands, marching down from above over the hill, who, collectively, had nothing to seek in his palace, but enough to find. But as, in the second place also, no one in the eighteenth century was seldomer at home than he--he, indeed, was so, but crouched down behind plate-glass windows or behind fire-proof wall or gabion, because, like a ring of Gyges, they rendered him invisible--accordingly, he might have found a refuge and withdrawn himself from so many mammalia as many miles off; but out on the meadow it was not to be done. A jolly man, and though he were a miser, will make others jolly: Roeper started, shuddered, resigned himself to his fate, and welcomed us more joyfully than we dreamed. He continued in the giving mood to-day, because he was once in the way of giving.

For his vassals who had to-day sworn away their good sense must also drink it away; some two buckets of stuff which tasted as sour as the means by which it had been earned he had released as prisoners from their dungeons on the coronation day--he had had the casks which held the liquor not so much inscribed as whitewashed and certified[50] or clarified with double chalk and had had scouring balls of chalky earth let down into them in hammocks so long that at last the beverage was too good to make a present of. The skinflint seeks to save, even while he bestows. For the rest he moved about among his feudal subjects more familiarly and generously than with us ennobled guests;--"this is the way a man always acts, who has no pride of nobility," says the reviewer; "but this is the way the niggard always does," say I, "to whom meaner but silver-veined men are of more account than guests that take what is due to their rank, and who places a servant of his own above an outside friend, and utility above dignity."--Louisa (Mrs. Commercial Agent von Roeper), attached to every beer-ark of her husband's a small shallop beside; his gifts were with her always a pretext for making privy supplements thereto. Only she charged the village magistrate to keep a sharp look-out that none of her yeast should be wasted. Nature had given her a free and loving soul; but this very love for her husband left her at least the appearance of his fault.

Thou true heart! let me linger for a few lines upon thy connubial disinterestedness, which counts all thy own virtues as sins and all thy husband's as virtues, and which no praise pleases but that which is given him whom thou surpassest! Why didst thou not fall to the lot of a soul which should imitate and understand and reward thee? Why have there been apportioned to thee for thy sacrifices, for thy heart-rendings here below, no pain-stilling drops but those which fall for thy sake from the fair eyes of thy daughter?

Ah, thou remindest me of all thy sisters in suffering--I know, indeed, full well, from my psychology, ye poor women, that your sufferings are not so great as I imagine them, for the very reason that I imagine and do not feel them, as the lightning, which at the distance of its appearing grows to a fiery snake, is in reality only a spark, which shoots through several moments; but can a man, ye feminine souls, conceive the inward calluses and gashes which his coarse, weapon-hardened finger must produce in your delicate nerves, since he does not deal with you even as you do with him, or as he himself does with the soppy, slimy caterpillars, which he does not venture to take away except with the whole leaf whereon they lie? And then, too, a Louisa and a Beata! But were _Jean Paul_ only your lawyer, as the old man has promised, he would give you solace enough....

But the old man is a poor stick to lean on; does he not creep round through all Lower Scheerau, voting in beforehand all advocates into his judiciary, in order to draw off us counsellors, by the hope of serving under him, from the purpose of serving against him? Meanwhile, however, he must deal honestly with _one_, and that is myself.

When the Bohemian chivalry and I went from the esplanade into the palace, they and I stumbled upon something very lovely and something very absurd. The absurd was sitting by the lovely. The absurd was called Oefel, the lovely was named Beata. Heaven should give an author a _time_ to paint her and an _eternity_ to love her; Oefel I can have done painting and loving in three seconds. It was an honor to me and to her, that she at once recognized in her old piano-teacher the old acquaintance; but it did not afford me any pleasure that she did not detect in the well-known one a something unknown, and that she did not remember at the sight of me, that she, from a child had become a woman. There is an age when one does indeed forgive the fair, even if they do not notice and do not accept us. Oh, I forgive thee everything, and the greatest proof of it is this, that I speak of it. The young youth admires and desires at once; the older youth is capable of merely admiring. Beata's words and feelings are still the dazzling white and pure fresh snow, just as they have fallen from heaven: no footprint and no step of age have yet smutched this splendor. She was to-day still more beautiful than ever, because she was busier than ever and lent her fair shoulders to her mother's burdens; the pale _lunar-aurora_ which once left the whole heaven upon her cheeks white, now suffused it with a rosy reflection; even the joy of others for which she was to-day active, gave her the heightened color which she usually lost by her own. The maidens know not how very much occupation beautifies them, how much upon them as on doves' necks the plumage plays and sparkles when they move about, and how very much we men resemble beasts of prey, who will not seize any creature that keeps a fixed position.