Part 42

I advanced nearer and nearer to the heart-central-fire of the women; and at last they mildly broke forth in censure of the Parson; the best wives will complain of their husbands to a stranger, without in the smallest liking them the less on that account. The mother and the wife, during dinner, accused him of buying lots at every book-auction; and, in truth, in such places, he does strive and bid not so much for good or for bad books--or old ones--or new ones--or such as he likes to read--or any sort of favourite books--but simply for books. The mother blamed especially his squandering so much on copperplates; yet some hours after, when the Schultheis, or Mayor, who wrote a beautiful hand, came in to subscribe for the steeple-ball, she pointed out to him how finely her son could engrave, and said that it was well worth while to spend a groschen or two on such capitals as these.

They then handed me,--for when once women are in the way of a full open-hearted effusion, they like (only you must not turn the stop-cock of inquiry) to pour out the whole,--a ring-case, in which he kept a Chamberlain's key that he had found, and asked me if I knew who had lost it. Who could know such a thing, when there are almost more Chamberlains than picklocks among us?--

At last I took heart, and asked after the little toy-press of the drowned son, which hitherto I had sought for in vain over all the house. Fixlein himself had inquired for it, with as little success. Thiennette gave the old mother a persuading look full of love; and the latter led me up-stairs to an outstretched hoop-petticoat, covering the poor press as with a dome. On the way thither the mother told me, she kept it hid from her son, because the recollection of his brother would pain him. When this deposit-chest of Time (the lock had fallen off) was laid open to me, and I had looked into the little charnel-house, with its wrecks of a childlike sportful Past, I, without saying a word, determined, some time ere I went away, to unpack these playthings of the lost boy, before his surviving brother: Can there be aught finer than to look at these ash-buried, deep-sunk Herculanean ruins of childhood, now dug up and in the open air?

Thiennette sent twice to ask me whether he was come. He and she, precisely because they do not give their love the weakening expression of phrases, but the strengthening one of actions, have a boundless feeling of it towards one another. Some wedded pairs eat each other's lips and hearts and love away by kisses,--as in Rome, the statues of Christ (by Angelo) have lost their feet by the same process of kissing, and got leaden ones instead; in other couples, again, you may see, by mere inspection, the number of their conflagrations and eruptions, as in Vesuvius you can discover his, of which there are now forty-three: but in these two beings rose the Greek fire of a moderate and everlasting love, and gave warmth without casting forth sparks, and flamed straight up without crackling. The evening-red is flowing back more magically from the windows of the gardener's cottage into my grove; and I feel as if I must say to Destiny: "Hast thou a sharp sorrow, then throw it rather into my breast, and strike not with it three good souls, who are too happy not to bleed by it, and too sequestered in their little dim village not to shrink back at the thunderbolt which hurries a stricken spirit from its earthly dwelling."----

Thou good Fixlein! Here comes he hurrying over the parsonage-green. What languishing looks full of love already rest in the eye of thy Thiennette!--What news wilt thou bring us tonight from the town!--How will the ascending steeple-ball refresh thy soul tomorrow!--

TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.

_Steeple-ball-Ascension. The Toy-press._

How, on this sixteenth of May, the old steeple-ball was twisted-off from the Hukelum steeple, and a new one put on in its stead, will I now describe to my best ability; but in that simple historical style of the Ancients, which, for great events, is perhaps the most suitable.

At a very early hour, a coach arrived containing Messrs. Court-Guilder Zeddel and Locksmith Waechser, and the new Peter's-cupola of the steeple. Towards eight o'clock the community, consisting of subscribers to the Globe, was visibly collecting. A little later came the Lord Dragoon Rittmeister von Aufhammer, as Patron of the church and steeple, attended by Mr. Church-Inspector Streichert. Hereupon my Reverend Cousin Fixlein and I repaired, with the other persons whom I have already named, into the Church, and there celebrated before innumerable hearers a weekday prayer-service. Directly afterwards, my Reverend Friend made his appearance above in the pulpit, and endeavoured to deliver a speech which might correspond to the solemn transaction;--and immediately thereafter, he read aloud the names of the patrons and charitable souls, by whose donations the Ball had been put together; and showed to the congregation the leaden box in which they were specially recorded; observing, that the book from which he had recited them was to be reposited in the Parish Register-office. Next he held it necessary to thank them and God, that he, above his deserts, had been chosen as the instrument and undertaker of such a work. The whole he concluded with a short prayer for Mr. Stechmann the Slater (who was already hanging on the outside on the steeple, and loosening the old shaft); and entreated that he might not break his neck, or any of his members. A short hymn was then sung, which the most of those assembled without the church-doors sang along with us, looking up at the same time to the steeple.

All of us now proceeded out likewise; and the discarded ball, as it were the amputated cock's-comb of the church, was lowered down and untied. Church-Inspector Streichert drew a leaden case from the crumbling ball, which my Reverend Friend put into his pocket, purposing to read it at his convenience; I, however, said to some peasants: "See, thus will your names also be preserved in the new Ball, and when, after long years, it shall be taken down, the box lies within it, and the then parson becomes acquainted with you all."--And now was the new steeple-globe, with the leaden cup in which lay the names of the bystanders, at length full-laden so to speak, and saturated, and fixed to the pulley-rope;--and so did this the whilom cupping-glass of the community ascend aloft....

By heaven! the unadorned style is here a thing beyond my power: for when the Ball moved, swung, mounted, there rose a drumming in the centre of the steeple; and the Schoolmaster, who, till now, had looked down through a sounding-hole directed towards the congregation, now stept out with a trumpet at a side sounding-hole, which the mounting Ball was not to cross.--But when the whole Church rung and pealed, the nearer the capital approached its crown,--and when the Slater clutched it and turned it round, and happily incorporated the spike of it, and delivered down, between Heaven and Earth, and leaning on the Ball, a Topstone-speech to this and all of us,--and when my gossip's eyes, in his rapture at being Parson on this great day, were running over, and the tears trickling down his priestly garment;--I believe I was the only man,--as his mother was the only woman,--whose souls a common grief laid hold of to press them even to bleeding; for I and the mother had yesternight, as I shall tell more largely afterwards, discovered in the little chest of the drowned boy, from a memorial in his father's hand, that, on the day after the morrow, on Cantata-Sunday and his baptismal-Sunday, he would be--two-and-thirty years of age. "O!" thought I, while I looked at the blue heaven, the green graves, the glittering ball, the weeping priest, "so, at all times, stands poor man with bandaged eyes before thy sharp sword, incomprehensible Destiny! And when thou drawest it and brandishest it aloft, he listens with pleasure to the whizzing of the stroke before it falls!"--

Last night I was aware of it; but to the reader, whom I was preparing for it afar off, I would tell nothing of the mournful news, that, in the press of the dead brother, I had found an old Bible which the boys had used at school, with a white blank leaf in it, on which the father had written down the dates of his children's birth. And even this it was that raised in thee, thou poor mother, the shade of sorrow which of late we have been attributing to smaller causes; and thy heart was still standing amid the rain, which seemed to us already past over and changed into a rainbow!--Out of love to him, she had yearly told one falsehood, and concealed his age. By extreme good luck, he had not been present when the press was opened. I still purpose, after this fatal Sunday, to surprise him with the parti-coloured reliques of his childhood, and so of these old Christmas-presents to make him new ones. In the mean while, if I and his mother can but follow him incessantly, like fish-hook-floats and foot-clogs, through tomorrow and next day, that no murderous accident lift aside the curtain from his birth-certificate,--all may yet be well. For now, in truth, to his eyes, this birthday, in the metamorphotic mirror of his superstitious imagination, and behind the magnifying magic vapour of his present joys, would burn forth like a red death-warrant.... But besides all this, the leaf of the Bible is now sitting higher than any of us, namely, in the new steeple-ball, into which I this morning prudently introduced it. Properly speaking there is indeed no danger.

THIRTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

_Christening._

Today is that stupid Cantata-Sunday; but nothing now remains of it save an hour.--By heaven! in right spirits were we all today. I believe I have drunk as faithfully as another.--In truth, one should be moderate in all things, in writing, in drinking, in rejoicing; and as we lay straws into the honey for our bees that they may not drown in their sugar, so ought one at all times to lay a few firm Principles, and twigs from the tree of Knowledge, into the Syrup of life, instead of those same bee-straws, that so one may cling thereto, and not drown like a rat. But now I do purpose in earnest to--write (and also live) with steadfastness; and therefore, that I may record the christening ceremony with greater coolness,--to besprinkle my fire with the night-air, and to roam out for an hour into the blossom-and-wave-embroidered night, where a lukewarm breath of air, intoxicated with soft odours, is sinking down from the blossom-peaks to the low-bent flowers, and roaming over the meadows, and at last launching on a wave, and with it sailing down the moonshiny brook. O, without, under the stars, under the tones of the nightingale, which seem to reverberate, not from the echo, but from the far-off down-glancing worlds; beside that moon, which the gushing brook in its flickering watery band is carrying away, and which creeps under the little shadows of the bank as under clouds,--O, amid such forms and tones, the heart of man grows serious; and as of old an evening bell was rung to direct the wanderer through the deep forests to his nightly home, so in our Night are such voices within us and about us, which call to us in our strayings, and make us calmer, and teach us to moderate our own joys, and to conceive those of others.

* * * * *

I return, peaceful and cool enough, to my narrative. All yesternight I left not the worthy Parson half an hour from my sight, to guard him from poisoning the well of his life. Full of paternal joy, and with the skeleton of the sermon (he was committing it to memory) in his hand, he set before me all that he had; and pointed out to me the fruit-baskets of pleasures which Cantata-Sunday always plucked and filled for him. He recounted to me, as I did not go away, his baptisms, his accidents of office; told me of his relatives; and removed my uncertainty with regard to the public revenues--of his parish, to the number of his communicants and expected catechumens. At this point, however, I am afraid that many a reader will in vain endeavour to transport himself into my situation, and still be unable to discover why I said to Fixlein: "Worthy gossip, better no man could wish himself." I lied not, for so it is.... But look in the Note.[60]

[60] A long philosophical elucidation is indispensably requisite: which will be found in this Book, under the title: _Natural Magic of the Imagination_. [A part of the _Jus de Tablette_ appended to this Biography, unconnected with it, and not given here.--ED.]

At last rose the Sunday, the present; and on this holy day, simply because my little godson was for going over to Christianity, there was a vast racket made: every time a conversion happens, especially of nations, there is an uproaring and a shooting; I refer to the two Thirty-Years Wars, to the more recent one, and to the earlier, which Charlemagne so long carried on with the heathen Saxons: thus, in the _Palais Royal_, the Sun, at his transit over the meridian, fires off a cannon.[61] But this morning the little Unchristian, my godson, was precisely the person least attended to; for, in thinking of the conversion, they had no time left to think of the convert. Therefore I strolled about with him myself half the forenoon; and, in our walk, hastily conferred on him a private-baptism; having named him _Jean Paul_ before the priest did so. At midday, we sent the beef away as it had come; the Sun of happiness having desiccated all our gastric juices. We now began to look about us for pomp; I for scientific decorations of my hair, my godson for his christening-shirt, and his mother for her dress-cap. Yet before the child's-rattle of the christening-bell had been jingled, I and the midwife, in front of the mother's bed, instituted Physiognomical Travels[62] on the countenance of the small Unchristian, and returned with the discovery, that some features had been embossed by the pattern of the mother, and many firm portions resembled me; a double similarity, in which my readers can take little interest. _Jean Paul_ looks very sensible for his years, or rather for his minutes, for it is the small one I am speaking of.----

[61] This pigmy piece of ordnance, with its cunningly devised burning-glass, is still to be seen on the south side of the Paris Vanity-Fair; and in fine weather, to be heard, on all sides thereof, proclaiming the _conversion_ (so it seems to Richter) of the Day from Forenoon to Afternoon.--ED.

[62] See _Musaeus_, ante.--ED.

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

In my chamber, I have a hundred times determined to smile at solemnities, in the midst of which I afterwards, while assisting at them, involuntarily wore a petrified countenance, full of dignity and seriousness. For, as the Schoolmaster, just before the baptism, began to sound the organ,--an honour never paid to any other child in Hukelum,--and when I saw the wooden christening-angel, like an alighted Genius, with his painted timber arm spread out under the baptismal ewer, and I myself came to stand close by him, under his gilt wing, I protest the blood went slow and solemn, warm and close, through my pulsing head, and my lungs full of sighs; and, to the silent darling lying in my arms, whose unripe eyes Nature yet held closed from the full perspective of the Earth, I wished, with more sadness than I do to myself, for his Future also as soft a sleep as today; and as good an angel as today, but a more living one, to guide him into a more living religion, and, with invisible hand, conduct him unlost through the forest of Life, through its falling trees, and Wild Hunters,[63] and all its storms and perils.... Will the world not excuse me, if when, by a side-glance, I saw on the paternal countenance prayers for the son, and tears of joy trickling down into the prayer; and when I noticed on the countenance of the grandmother far darker and fast-hidden drops, which she could not restrain, while I, in answer to the ancient question, engaged to provide for the child if its parents died,--am I not to be excused if I then cast my eyes deep down on my little godson, merely to hide their running over?--For I remembered that his father might perhaps this very day grow pale and cold before a suddenly arising mask of Death; I thought how the poor little one had only changed his bent posture in the womb with a freer one, to bend and cramp himself ere long more harshly in the strait arena of life; I thought of his inevitable follies and errors and sins; of these soiled steps to the Grecian Temple of our Perfection; I thought that one day his own fire of genius might reduce himself to ashes, as a man that is electrified can kill himself with his own lightning.... All the theological wishes, which, on the godson-billet printed over with them, I placed in his young bosom, were glowing written in mine.... But the white feathered-pink of my joy had then, as it always has, a bloody point within it,--I again, as it always is, went to nest, like a woodpecker, in a skull.... And as I am doing so even now, let the describing of the baptism be over for today, and proceed again tomorrow....

[63] The Wild Hunter, _Wilde Jaeger_, is a popular spectre of Germany.--ED.

FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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