Part 33

Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up, close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their main equipments, like Phoenixes, existed but in the singular number; one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quit-rent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture,--he was just come to the subject of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_,--to descry, through the window of his auditorium, a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.

[35] From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of the Pope; the neighbourhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not abridged by _falcidia_, &c. &c.

Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road, courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle: houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fraeulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of his benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.

Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction like an order of nobility does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into _Resonance_ together.

It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which tomorrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crum of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein,--the counterpart of great men and geniuses,--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving house-mate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honour in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honour, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[36] he could not figure: the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.

[36] _Literary Germany_; a work (I believe of no great merit) which Richter often twitches in the same style.--ED.

He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.

After supper, he was just about visiting the Fraeulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipt in the red twilight, in the Castle-garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c. &c.,--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.

Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat: for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man: they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better,--also by reason of our sublime air,--if they can catch us in the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will: _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red may-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.

To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed: in the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary-tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[37] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.

[37] See _Schmelzle's Journey_, p. 284.--ED.

In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....

Sleep, for today thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look forth into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--

SECOND LETTER-BOX.

_Frau von Aufhammer. Childhood-Resonance. Authorcraft._

The early piping which the little thrush last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fraeulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."

He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck.--If women are flowers,--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones,--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave: nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion: the lower classes she assisted, cherished and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.

She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance: "She should soon die; but the god-children of her husband she would remember in her will." Farther, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Buergermeister and Council had the right of nomination), she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Buergermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."

And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this, true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Shadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love: and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as readily as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us,--as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is, by the magnet,--attracted and held fast.

Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus' soul, yet they had not sprouted; and today especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who,--what he reckoned a Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity but from piety,--was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied: That he now straight-way came forth with his petition to the noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."

The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass); yet he could not but fall-in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon.--But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.

In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving, that with these historical documents of the time, they were scandalously papering the buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world--twelve months ago.

On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honour, but silently to thank God, as himself was now doing.

* * * * *

The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides. I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them: one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.

Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fireproof joys, that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question, had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had laboured,--I shall omit his less interesting performances,--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in German writings: he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.

Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[38]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show? Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."

[38] As in the State.--V. or Von, _de_, _of_, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.--ED.

I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know, if on a more accurate summation they find this number incorrect.[39]

[39] In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The _Bible Institution_ of that town have found instead of the 116,301 A's, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. See _Luedeke's Beschr. des Tuerk. Reichs_ (Luedeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).

Much also did the Quintus _collect_: he had a fine _Almanac Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also a _Collection of Advertisements_, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his _Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name also occurs among the J's.