Chapter X: Conclusion (6)

The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins, but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him. Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as merely a member of the joy-club.

Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons, the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp, nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.

As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion, and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable _privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_) to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.

The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed ones go out to the world.

Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have, like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far, and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine _stater_.

The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room, to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and superscribed by the registresses of rooms.

The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when he--beheads.

When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant, however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains," he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--

So do I.

P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes on.

FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.

Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?

The latter.--To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (_servitus oneris ferendi_, or I may say _servitus projiciendi_) which, according to the contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is, whether a dog-contract between two such great powers--inasmuch as the reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the reader--must, after being concluded, also be kept.

Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as it--is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would never be broken, if they were not once--concluded; and the Swiss, who, as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every day regularly--make water.

But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent entitled to break them in two cases,--those which he makes with other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the country,--his subjects.

While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I proposed to show that the _ouverture_ of treaties (_au nom de la Sainte Trinité_ or _in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis_) was the cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the fugitive paper but a--manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and hour, _declinations_ and _inclinations_. I proposed to whistle the state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and said, The whistler may believe, himself,--we do the thing otherwise.

In the works of Herr _Herkommen_[109]--the best German publicist, who, however, writes no _acta sanctorum_ it is proved that a reigning prince need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is far less bound to keep his _own_ covenants with them, since the enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr. Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it. Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little reason--considering that, according to a general assumption, a king never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together into one man--as not to draw from this the conclusion that the successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as much as if they were transmitted ones?

Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that, in fact, _no man whatever_ needs keep his word, not merely no prince. According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a superintendent of mines) in _three_ years makes way for a new one. Hume carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then, the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing more is extant than our mere _posthumi_ and successors,--namely, ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion, pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this proposition.

The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.

9. DOG-POST-DAY.

A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
without Walls; a Bed without a House.

Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated! Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.

Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and; strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.

He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew, when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.

Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already he heard the musical _mêlée_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed, kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over the earth....

Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!

With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster, and his heart swelled even to devotion....

--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.

The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire, and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--

Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts, and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees; he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the children, whose days played even like his hours--

But men he avoided....

And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however, was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication, which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul.... But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?

In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy, but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and, flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain stream.--

Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and _over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_ it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--

All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an immeasurable soul.--

He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in his dark breast this blooming immensity.

Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk, enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is man!"

He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense, but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the breast of the immortal mother of Spring.

Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.

In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love, was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury, to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"

He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed, of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far beyond earshot....

Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart, like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!

In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but _undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were, round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too giddy and too weak.

So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way, manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_ to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....

A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.

He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e. framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy (he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"

During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees not that all is like him.

Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions, he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.

Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes. These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on, wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did not scorch them.

Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion, did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....

Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.

10. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.

Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German _Reviewers_ should do me the favor to start him up.

But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed, and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....

The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells, wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,--when into his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,--when the air, bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,--then was to-day's sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."

On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop between the supporting poles of their leather die.[112] He made after them,--their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth, everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world, beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.

"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our most gracious Lord!" It was January,--it is, however, quite in accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I utter the next word.

It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a nail to the wall. On the whole _sentimental journey_ the _cubic contents_ of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the _superficial area_ of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all night long....

As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the spot.

EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.

"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact, in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a _cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries, on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the _plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and _not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from strange.

_End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.

At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all, unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have seen all.

As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so consecrated by Nature.

He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases, animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera, according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother" (so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his relations on the father's side?

O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past, a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul, have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that, while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.

As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior (not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a _sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in the sciences than we with the whole hand.

She related that her father would not marry her till after two years, and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian, named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but equally--stupid.

But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street, while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry kernel in a walnut.

I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less consequence.

Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a _distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel, into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff, which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!

Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits, but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day," replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a garter it would be different.

Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.

He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_; the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_ it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing paper and without engravings.

He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her, than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."