Part 8

Namely: they could not bear to be so long apart, as it took to unbind and bind up the eyes. As often as the bandage came off, Gustavus stood before him and absolutely demanded that he should see him, and put his finger up to his own nose and said: "Where do I touch now?" But he examined the blind boy without seeing. After a week's absence Amandus ran up to him, saying: "Shove up my bandage, I can certainly see thee too as well as my cat Harry!" When Gustavus had lifted[25] it up, and when it proved that he actually passed into the eye of his cured friend, just as he was, coat, shoes and stockings, then was he gladder than a patriot whose Prince opens his eyes or his bandage and sees him. He inventoried his picture-cabinet before his eyes with a perpetual "look!" at every piece. But yet further! The world will know little of it--except those minute particles thereof, the children, of whom it is that I am just going to speak--that these latter played blindman's buff at Hoppedizel's. A disagreeable game!--when there are girls in the case, as there were here, especially such naughty ones as the Professor's were. Amandus introduced himself into the game, and ran round the room, behind the handkerchief, which female cunning had folded over his eyes, catching nothing but disembodied clothes. Unfortunately, crawling, contrary to all proper rules of the game, under the stove, they came against the milk-pan of the dog Spitz. As, now, they had read at that time too few moral philosophers, although they had seen enough of them, accordingly, for want of pure _practical reason_, they softly pushed the pan so far forward that the groping catch-poll easily trampled upon and tipped it over. Gustavus, as a child, could not help laughing a little. The little sinners threw the blame on him and cried: "O you! if now Amandus had received an injury?" The latter extricated himself from the wet fragments and slightly thumped Gustavus, who was holding him by the hands to comfort him behind on the shoulder-blade, just where according to the Compends the chyle (or milk-juice) joins the blood. "I didn't set it there, indeed I didn't," said he. "Yes, yes! and didn't tell me of it," replied the blindman and gave him another push, only more _violently_ and yet less _angrily_. "Strike away, I did not do anything to thee," and my good hero's voice broke--the other struck at him again and said: "I will never be friends with you any more," but said it as if he was just on the point of weeping. "Ah, thou hast surely run a splinter into thy hand?" asked Gustavus with the most sympathetic voice--in the midst of attempting a fresh punch the thin crust of ice melted down from the warmed heart of Amandus, he embraced the innocent one, and said with glistening tears: "No, indeed! thou hast not done anything, and I will give thee all my playthings; I pray thee, beat me right hard," and so saying he beat himself. It is only the feeling of love that struggles with such bitter-sweet singularities. Amandus often confessed that whenever he had done injustice to any one, in the midst of his grief about it, the propensity always seized him to keep on offending, in order to continue grieving himself so far that at last for very anguish he must needs throw himself with the most ardent love upon the heart of the injured one. But, oh dear Amandus, if a pedagogue in the form of a moral code had happened to open the door!

It must never be supposed that I would vent here personal resentment upon tutors in a body, for, in the first place, I never had any tutor at all, and, secondly, I have been one myself, and a proper one.

TWELFTH SECTION.

Concert.--The Hero Gets a Fashionable Tutor.

I have betaken myself to a new section because I have therein to present to the reader a new person--the Tutor of my hero.

I need not remind a soul, that the Captain looked for so foolish a thing--a thing now too pliable, now too bashful--such a moralizing, spiritless thing as a tutor, in Scheerau, in order that his child might get a regent at the same time with the country. Now, he had there a godfather, who practiced law, music, small talk and the lorgnette and the world's manners; but he had not the courage to propose to that party the office of instruction in a seminary of which the number of pupils amounted to one male. I will just say it out at once, that I myself am this godfather and this new personage; but it will stand my modesty in better stead, if, in a section where I must needs bring forward so much in my own praise, I transpose myself out of the first person into the third, and say merely godfather, not I.

This godfather blew in the Unter-Scheerau Concert, in order, with his flute, to accompany the heavenly voice of a very young Frauelein von Roeper, whose throat could often hardly be distinguished from the flute. The whole soul of this damsel is a nightingale's tone under an overhanging curtain of blossoms; her body is a falling, heavenly-pure snowflake, which lasts only in the ether and melts away on the filthy ground. The flutist's eyes and heart were arrested, during the pauses, by a beautiful child, who was lost in a dreamy, phantasying gaze of rapturous attention: it was Gustavus. His first look, after the accompaniment, was toward the neighborhood of the child, in order to find his owner--the first step the godfather took was to the other godparent, the Captain, whose friendly relations with me are well enough known. The male sex is more fortunate and less envious than the female, because the former is able to appreciate with the whole soul two kinds of beauty, male and female; whereas women, for the most part, love only that of the other sex. I, however, have, perhaps, too much enthusiasm for that exalted thing, manly beauty, as well as for poetic enthusiasm, notwithstanding that, of the latter at least, I myself have nothing. From Gustavus the double enchantment acted upon me; I forgot all the enchantresses of the concert in the enchanter; but in the end I was sad, because I could win fewer words than glances from the lovely boy. To the concert, moreover, I, like the rest of the hearers, paid attention only so long as I myself was a fellow-laborer, or as long as one of my female pupils played; for the Scheerau concerts are merely town-talk and prosaic melodramas set to music, wherein the gossip of the hearers in their seats runs along as printed text under the composition. For the rest we subscribe to our concerts more for our children's sake than our own; the musical school-youth get there a dancing floor and riding-school for their fingers and one at least of my catechumens weekly thrums and thrashes the harpsichord. I encourage the parents to this, and say that in such a concert-hall the little ones learn time, because of that there is not only enough there, but more than enough, inasmuch as every musical functionary there pipes, beats, strikes, stamps his own original time, which, in the first place, no one of his neighbors pipes, beats, strikes or stamps after him, and which he himself, secondly, improves from minute to minute. And even if this were not so, I tell them, still there is true musical expression there, and enough to spare; every one expresses there his own emotions, whether of embarrassment or of complete confusion, on his particular instrument; and Bach's rule, to render dissonances forcibly and consonances faintly, every one understands in a hall where the consonances melt in so softly that one can hardly catch a single one of them, and fancies he hears only the discords.

The next morning I flew, half-dressed, to the Captain and--as I could not secure the dear little fellow at any lower price--I brought him right up to the first object of his journey, namely, to take a tutor home with him. It must not be thought that I got myself made an instructor in order to be a biographer, _i. e_., in order craftily to educate _into_ my Gustavus all that I afterward wanted to write out of him into a book; for, in the first place, I, surely, as a romance-manufacturer, needed merely to imagine myself such, and impose the fiction upon others; but, secondly, at that time a biography had not been thought of.

It is of far less concern to me to see that my Scheerau relations are understood, than to the world, for I know them already, but the world does not. I formed there a Trinity of three persons. I was music master, legal adviser, and man of the world. Three whimsical parts! I studied in a city which once furnished the greatest _jurists_ and now furnishes the smallest _dogs_, two quite opposite articles, as Paris was once the University of all European _theologues_ and is now of _philosophers_. I have been in Paris also. There, too, I might have become a clever Parliamentary advocate but I would not, and brought nothing away from there with me (as well as from Bologna and some German Imperial cities) but the black legal cloak, which has its reason; for as our clients feed and fee us, and retain more justice and poverty than money, accordingly we patrons mourn for them in black. With the Romans, on the contrary, the clients, who got more than they gave, put on for the advocate, when he came off poorly, a mourning suit.

Secondly, I was music master, but perhaps not a very steady one; for I fell in love with all my female pupils the first quarter (male pupils I declined), and let my feelings shape themselves after my lessons. I cherished a true tenderness, first, towards a lady of rank, whom I will never compromise; secondly, towards her sister, an Abbess, because she learned thorough bass of me; thirdly, towards...; fourthly, towards the wife of the Court Chaplain, who, it is true, is hectic but aesthetic, and who loved too much rather than too little _embellishment upon_ the piano (in the local sense of the proposition), and polished, covered and set out the instrument to the finest effect; fifthly, with the lady of the Minister-resident, von Bouse, who has not the least idea of the fact, and at whose hips and charms I was actually stupid with admiration, till I fortunately detected her indiscriminate coquetry and her infidelity to her incognito lover; sixthly, with the whole Court of Scheerau, where, according to the right of the _dead hand_, I looked upon the reception of a live hand, which offered itself for a pupil of mine, as an investment of the whole heart and goods; seventhly, even with a veritable child, Beata (the above mentioned daughter of Roeper), for whom I, once a week in bad weather, and for an equally poor salary, ran out into the country, and with whom one could absolutely think of nothing else but love. In short, there is nothing, leaf-buds, blossom-buds, blossoms, fruits, with which a man does not get entangled who is a teacher of the piano.

Now comes the Man of the World. I cannot, to be sure, show myself personally to my readers (of whom I should be glad to have the population and exact tabulated statement); but the people of Scheerau, before whom this leaf comes, are hereby challenged to speak out their thoughts and decide whether a man who gives the great world three piano lessons daily is any more its teacher than its scholar. Dignity, grace of gait, taste in dress, attitudes, perpendicular, horizontal and diagonal, are not, to be sure, the required merits of an author (though they are of the fine gentleman), and cannot be printed; but this much only I contend for, that it is only at a court one learns all this, especially when he has some influence and takes part as a player, whether at the Hombre table or at the piano table,[26] which, like many a breast at the court, under the dumb wooden surface, conceals a sweet stringed instrument. Of course, when one walks up and down in his study again, among great books and great men, accompanied by the whole republican past, uplifted to the profound perspective of the infinite world beyond the grave, then even the possessor of them despises his shells of empty distinctions. He asks himself: Is there nothing better than to be master over his body (instead of over his passions) and to carry it as lightly as after the first three glasses of champagne--to tone down his style to the universal style, because at courts and at pianos no key must sound out above another--to glide along on the thin _joggling board_ of female fancies with such a flying touch that our steps merely accompany the swaying--to dance and walk elegantly, so far as is practicable with one long leg (for, of course, if a piano teacher has to contend with a short leg, the Old Boy may stand on both if he can, as gracefully as the Prince of Artois)--in short, to sublimate all sense into nonsense, all truths into concerts, all honest feelings into pantomimic parodies? Nothing better is there? Ask the perambulator of the study. There _is_ something far better--to be a tutor in Auenthal to such a child of heaven as Gustavus is, and put the whole vagary in print.

THIRTEENTH SECTION.

Public Mourning of the Knaves.--Prince of Scheerau.-- Princely Debts.

The Crown-Prince, for whose payment of his debts the Captain waited, was still on the high-road in foreign parts, whence he drove up on to the throne as up into a tower. Three miserable knaves made their entry still earlier than he. The thing can be narrated: Since the death of His Highness of most blessed memory--the Pope is the highest and most blessedest--one church after another in Scheerau had been, not plundered, but dismantled; the church thieves merely stripped off again the public mourning-cloth, which was on our pulpits and altars. The sextons and choristers found every morning the holy places scalped and the parsons had to stand there in the morning service. Now that money-grasping condor, the commercial agent Roeper, had lately caused altar and pulpit in the Maussenbach Church to be rigged out in a frock of black cloth--figured was not holy and cheap enough for him. This sable wrappage was left on them as public mourning--old Roeper had consequently very little sleep any longer, because he feared the church-vultures would rob the Maussenbach altar of its festal robing and carry off at the same time the certificate stitched to the cloth which set forth in silken and silver letters who had presented it all. His lawyer, Kolb, therefore, to whom thief-catching is sable-hunting and pearl-fishery, invested the church with all kinds of falcon-eyes; but all would have amounted to nothing had not Falkenberg's servant Robisch on Sunday evening, so soon as the church was closed, said to the schoolmaster, "he should leave it just as it was, he had counted the congregation, and three had not come out with the rest." In short they blockaded the temple till night and fortunately hauled out three secreted cloth-corsairs from the sacred place. The next morning there was a general astonishment; the three church-goers rode in through the gate of Scheerau on a hangman's cart, having on, all of them, black coats and trowsers--at night they had disappeared. For the court (if it had not yet gone to sleep) it was a hateful prospect, that a band of robbers should have put on court-mourning as well as itself, and have stolen for that purpose the mourning wardrobe out of the churches.

"You ought to be hanged," said the Captain to his fellow, "to bring poor thieves to grief, who take nothing from any man, but only from churches." "But surely for such knaves," said I, "it is not fitting to put on court-mourning, if only on account of the expense. In fact why is it that one may not mourn for his personal father[27] though he may for the father of his country? Or why does the Privy Chamber even allow weeping to the children of the land, when, surely, that exhausts the lachrymal glands of the State, and when tears, too, are exempt from taxation?"

"You go too far," said the Captain, "the present administration must keep on in the course it has thus far pursued, if it is to distinguish itself from all its predecessors by the solicitude with which it watches over our grounds, our pennies and our purses."

"The negro-dealers," said the Doctor, but irrelevantly enough, "are still more watchful; for a slave-trader is more troubled by the unfitness of such or such an article--of men or slaves, than of his own wife. Even flexibility of limb and grace in dancing his human live-stock must possess and he cudgels them into it."

"Agriculture," he continued, "trade, manufactures, even national wealth and welfare, in short the _bodies_ of his subjects, the worst despot can rear and nourish--but for their _souls_ he can do nothing, without acting at every step against his own."

It has often occurred to me, whether mourning-regulations or delegations have not for their object that the sly and sad citizen may avail himself of the liberty of public mourning in order to throw in his domestic mourning into the common mass? Might he not lay up his individual sorrow over the mortality of his aunts, his cousins, till a general application occurred, and so, when the country had wound the condolatory crape round arm and sword, do up all the mourning in a lump and grieve under the same crape for a mother of the country and a step-mother? For courts 'twere easy. Nay, could not these, in fact, in the public mourning mourn for their relations in advance? Might not one, after all, let the whole nonsense drop?...

At last my new sovereign rode in his traveling carriage up on to the throne, and exchanged the coach-canopy for the throne-canopy. The Captain, before the coronation, held a petition in readiness, wherein with the defiance of a saddler, he demanded his money; after the coronation the Prince, like a diamond, had absorbed so much fiery splendor from his crown and his sceptre, that his creditor got his lawyer to draw up a new memorial in which he insisted merely on the interest. As he got nothing, not so much as a resolution, he determined to demand more. For he did not consider that our reigning providers in Scheerau seldom have any money. When we receive or send extraordinary embassies, when we have occasion for baptism or burial, not to mention wars, in such cases we have little or nothing but--extra-taxes, those metallic props and clamps of the rotten throne. In the exchequer-chest, as in heraldry, we denote silver by vacant space.

But both debtor and creditor soon found relief. The latter, the Captain, was marching, as cicerone, with his Gustavus through the cadet quarters and showing him everything for the sake of praising everything, because he was one day to put his head into a gorget--when the young Prince came in also and inspected all the apartments, not in order to forget all on the next saddle, but in order to observe nothing at all. I was sorry--for I had come in at the same time--that every professor relied upon it the Regent would number, if not every hair on his head, yet every lock in his peruke; for he did not so much as notice me and my dignity; very naturally, however, since such a dignity had already become an old story with him, as seen in the finest salons of all lands. He wore--for how long had he been back from his travels?--the princely hat with the nonchalance of a lady's hat; no long administration had yet pressed in the crown to make a dark line around his brow, and the _erect_ persons around him had not yet been refracted by the media and moisture and membranes of his eye into _crooked_ prison-laborers. His words he handed round with the munificence of a man of the world, as he would so much snuff; at last Falkenberg also got a pinch. I see my two principals still standing vis-a-vis--my noble and lending principal with the firm but respectful decorum of a soldier, compressed into embonpoint and swelling muscles, and with the confiding kindliness which good-natured persons cherish towards every one who is at the moment talking with them--the crowned and insolvent principal, however, with the picturesque dignity, in which every limb bends inward respectfully to the others, and in which the very attitude is a prolonged flattery, with a drapery of many folds in his pain-racked face, with a complaisance which neither refuses nor consents. My god-father regarded the stereotype complacency of the crowned head as exclusively directed to him; he thought the latter put his questions for the sake of getting an answer; and particularly when my most gracious prince and sovereign had actually expressed himself to the effect that "the little Gustavus was in his place _here_," that "he excited a stronger interest by his _air de reveur_, than one could explain to himself," and that "so soon as he should be old enough for this institution, one would buy him off from his father for 13,000 Rix dollars cash down:" then was the Captain thrown out of his wits, or rather out of his petition; his petitionary paper was turned into a thanksgiving address; his wish was, that I had already been tutor in his home for eight years; his hope was, the money would follow; and the real advantage was, that his son would get into the best German military academy.

It will be doing me no favor if any one ridicules him. To be sure he swore at his castle: "He wouldn't trust courtiers a hand's breath, and the whole _nation_ was an offence to his nostrils;" on the other hand, he trusted such court-people as he had, at the moment, to do with him, somewhat more, only--military _ignorantia legum_ must bear much of the blame in his case; how is he, as a soldier, to know that a prince is not bound to pay any debt?--Perhaps it is not even known to all readers so well as they may assume to themselves. For three reasons a regent need not pay a farthing which he has borrowed of his subjects (if his royal father was the borrower, it is understood, of course). First: an ambassador, be he of the first or third rank, would fly into the face of the oldest publicists, if he should discharge his debts; now he who is the mere representative and brimstone printed copy of the regent, cannot possibly have rights which are denied the original, consequently is not paid. Secondly: The prince is--or else we can no longer believe another word of our academical afternoon lessons--the true summary, abstract and representative of the State (as the envoy, again, is a representative of the representative or a _portable state_ in small), and consequently so stands for each member of the body politic that lends him a kreutzer, as if he himself were that member; accordingly he in reality lends to himself, when such a part and parcel of his representative self makes him a loan. Very well! that is granted; but then one must also grant that a prince would make himself as ridiculous if he should pay back to his own subjects, as the father of General Sobouroff did when he honorably refunded to himself the capital which he had advanced to himself, with the legal interest of the country, and paid the penalty to himself according to the statutes of exchange; whence could it come then, except from their relationship to the throne and its privileges, that even great ones, great in reference to rank and amount of debts, were allowed to become bankrupt? Or why is a legal consensus book or register of mortgages the most exact Court Blue-book or _Almanac royal_? Thirdly: The most botched subject can secure from his prince letters of respite or _moratoria_; but who shall give them to the prince, unless he does it to himself? And if he does not do it for conscience sake, he can at least every five years grant a renewed quinquennial.

But there is no fourth reason that I know of.

FOURTEENTH SECTION.

Connubial Ordeals.--Five Biters Bit.