Chapter M (1)

Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly, if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229] that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.

N.

Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces (children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews, then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as _out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with _vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."

O.

Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment. Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the _way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees, having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often _eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth, as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame.... Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.

P.

Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III. p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his _images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he would communicate to us.

I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely, ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more _one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.

Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.

Q (_see_ K).

R.

Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual _from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.

These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary day?

S.

Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.

I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of the will."

T.

Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or feet.

21. DOG-POST-DAY.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_ tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the _true_ ones.--

"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.

He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.

"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.

"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.

Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.

Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess. Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.

What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--

He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy (_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but only that he had--sent him to her.

Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many _beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.

When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything, least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than usual.

--Many people would sooner live without houses than without building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess, incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world and everything that may benumb its wounds!

With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half an----

EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!

The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one, under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat places? Thus Linnæus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the sower of them?--

Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say, are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought? Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one travels through German cities, where every richest or most distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great, now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one! Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired, solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life; thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes; but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover, and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form is thy _virtue_."

_End of the Extra-Leaf_.

Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en médaillon_ with the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye, "She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is well known, is the patroness of eyes.

Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna; for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration. _Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself, not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the other the fine one.

Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have, however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon, who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the streets, and offer their crazy _personæ_ for sale.

The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_, stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her _cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife, in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary bead,--or because he didn't know why.

Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c., without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a _bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye, "Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.

When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les sages à la folie_."

The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker. To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.

The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses. Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was, or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words, Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They _love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning. The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this, that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might signify.----

The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,--he went thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them. Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds, and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel; some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister, that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and "Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it had an originator or an originatress....

As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the card-houses (in Hamilton's _mémoires_), the cutting out of pictures, the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.

As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister, and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.

He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real. The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false. Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.

But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested, from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself, "Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well, run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself, and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down. He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended the visit and the Post-Day.

22. DOG-POST-DAY.

Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
Giulia's dying Epistle.

The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.

Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks. Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio (the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of pigsties.

They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more than too many imitators among us?----

WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).

Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart, because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----

The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts, alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man; the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of _Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans, Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and why he fled from the father to the daughter.

This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed, _over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry; for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others, because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and _complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart, which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.

WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF
THE YEAR 179-.

Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would, if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have to adore, and how long."

It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed her hand through the whole November night."

I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word _perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself, which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies," said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long; often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers. Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen; but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a quarrel, and added: "_C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous fâcher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming away.

He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled. Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men often love another merely on that account.

The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to be reconciled.

But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.