Chapter V: Part 5

There might have been, indeed, a question whether it was the same watch, as the one in Tostato's shop had no diamonds,--had there not come fluttering out from this Pandora's box, so soon as it was opened at the window, a little thin piece of paper half as big as a butterfly's wing, and as long as the stamen of a tulip.--The little leaf took flight at every breath of wind.----Joachime caught the thing,--read the thing,--found the declaration of love still there,--took it for one which he was just making to _herself_, by way of atoning for his absence, and which, for the sake of the wit (he might allude to its heart-shape), he had been trying to incorporate into the watch....

Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.--He would have got through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,--of which a single one may, as a _liquor probatorius_, leave behind in the remaining mass confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside from the mark,--that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,--a habit on the Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an _Isaac_ with a _ram_, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither could he bring himself even to _this_, to sacrifice Joachime for the sake of saving _her_, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a sweet-billet (_billet-doux_) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to another lady.

He told her right out plainly what he was,--a fool. He narrated the whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime in a state which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated women in a fine, proud _exaltation_, and with uncultivated ones in the attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek artists did to their models,--namely, with the finger-nails. Victor took his leave with two very different sorts of _views_, those of the future and those of Maienthal.--

She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope, this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an oath before Heaven that one will be good;---but a single sacrifice steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential sermons.

I have not the courage to guess why the Princess should have given the watch with the enclosure which she (even by the showing of her conversation with Tostato) must have read, into the hands of Joachime; but to the suspicious knaves whom I thought of when writing the chapter of her eye-bandaging and kiss, this is a windfall: the present of the watch confirms them entirely in their knavish creed; for they can now--despite all my efforts to the contrary--allege the gift as a sign of the Italian revenge which Agnola had proposed to herself to take upon her rival Joachime (to whom she must needs ascribe Victor's resistance) in the fact of communicating to her his declarations of love in other quarters.

Victor proposed to himself, as he took the greatest physical strides homeward, to take similar politic ones, and to confess plumply to the Prince: "It is not much over nine months since I troubled your Illustrious Highness's bride with a flimsy declaration of love, which she certainly cannot have ever read, and which now changes hands." But at present the opening of the affair of the watch-letter was impracticable: January was a little vexed at Clotilda's withdrawal; Victor had also for some time been less about him than usual, which certainly with an honest favorite ought not to be so, as, e. g., the famous Count von Brühel[56] watched, like a mother, around his master from morn to midnight. January seemed in this loneliness to think more of his children, and Victor had no tidings to impart to him from his Lordship. The main thing, moreover, was his spring sickliness, which made him again the credulous disciple of Dr. Culpepper and the gout. This doctor's trunk under a doctor's hat, whose brain-fibres were twisted to bass-strings, extolled his simplicities, merely by the solemn pomposity with which he delivered himself of them, beyond their value; of certain persons, e. g. physicians, financiers, economical-agents, even people of fine manners require stiff ones, and make more account of a pointed wig than of a hair-bag as big as a buckle or a Titus's-head.[57] Sebastian appeared to people much too waggish to allow them to think that he had learned anything. In the article of physicians--as in every main article of property or of life--the most distinguished vulgar think as the lowest, and prize men and lapdogs according to shaggy wildness of exterior. Besides, Victor had the fault of bringing himself and the physicians under suspicion of a thirst for glory, in that he praised them outright; e. g. "By their impressment of sailors and dead men they were a sort of buyers-up of souls for the next world, and served for nut-crackers to the good angels, who desired the kernel without the bodily shell, in order to transplant it. How often do we not obviate," he continued, "the most dangerous _transfers of maladies_ by an easy _transfer_ of the patient? I might appeal to the _refugiés_ from this world, whether our sandbox and inkstand (the implements of our receipts) are not the sowing-machine and waterpot of the winter-crop of humanity; but the survivors shall speak and answer whether, for the benefices, the regiments, the estates in fee, the order-ribbons, which fall to them, they have not to thank our recipes and Uriah's-letters, and whether they or even kings would sit _high and dry_, without our frequent _ditching_ and draining in the churchyard.--And yet, methinks, our renown in the way of healing and bringing to life is quite as great, if not greater; this glory--as well as the lists of mortality on which it is based--has remained for many centuries the _same_,--our theories, specifics, judgments, may _change_ as they will."

Such satires made the Prince right merry and incredulous. Dr. Culpepper, on the contrary, stood upon his dignity, and would have drawn his sword against a satirist who had talked of the slow decimation of physicians, and by a swifter one have completely refuted him. I advise every one who wants to be anything in the world (that is anything different from what he is) to appear among men as a funeral-bidder,--with women, as a godfather-bidder.--The Prince in the sickly spring held himself, for two reasons, to be possessed with the gout again: first, because I have never yet known a nervous weakling who, when I had talked a disease out of him in summer, did not the next sickly winter get it into his head again; secondly, because January calculated that he had fallen on his knee before ladies often enough to feel the traces of his adoration still lingering in the shape of _gonagra_ or knee-gout.

So stood matters, when a little accident made our Victor happy again. Only I must say beforehand that, independently of that, he was not at all unhappy: for a lover never worries himself about anything, certainly not about a court; he has on Cupid's bandage, and willingly forgives Fortune and Justice theirs. And the moral Easter-eve bonfire melted--just as superstition ascribes to the physical one a peculiar power--all the ice wherewith they dammed up Victor's blood into the lymph of joy; the Easter-wind--which, according to the weather-prophets, continues till Whitsuntide--set his old joy-flowers in motion, and wafted forth from them the pollen of future ones; the snow dissolved on the hot spring awaking from its winter sleep, and the first flowers and the thousand buds gave all hearts energies and hopes and love. O when Victor looked out of doors toward the green-growing path which, with fresh sap-colors, (for in spring the foot-paths grow green first,) would fain lure and lead him out of the midst of the after-grass heath to the Eden of Maienthal,--and then when he turned round glowing and thirsting, and ran over into the sketched Maienthal, into the borrowed views, and there climbed every colored mountain, and encircled every dotted-out garden with his fingers and fancies,--then he did not think himself that a little accident could make him still more joyous.--And yet it did.

It is not well done of me that I always--and it is a thing I have become very much accustomed to in this biography--call that an _accident_ which is a direct great-grandchild by blood of former chapters, and which really must come. For the crape hat--that was the accident--must indeed come, because it was bespoken. It was, however, the--original itself. Besides, in so small a time no hat could have been made by the nimblest master-builder of finery; and yet Sebastian never would have thought, had not traces of powder and opened lace-lattices compelled him, to distinguish the old hat from a new one. In short, Clotilda had given it to Agatha, who could not conceal from her for whom she was taking the copy, _before_ the _third_ Easter-holiday, for the purpose of letting her copy it, and _after_ the aforesaid day had written to her to send her the copy and pass off the original upon the Medicus for the imitation, (as in the case of the wax-statue,)--and why, perhaps?--O, of that her friend had a sweet consciousness; she was sorry that she could not give a shy, delicate heart anything, not a sound, nor a glance, nor a joy, nor a reminiscence of the fairest evening, except its mere autumnal after-flora, mere silk-flowers sewed together in imitation of that flower of joy, the taffeta shadow of a taffeta-shade.... No, she did violence to herself, in order to give the mute darling at least more than a copy of the shadow. O, if the loving, closed heart of a good woman should open before a man, how much controlled tenderness, how many veiled sacrifices and dumb virtues, would he see reposing therein!

--One must, at any rate, with the German Diet and its cross-benches; make no mystery of the fact, that Victor would not accept the ninth Electoral hat, or in fact the eighth and last, on condition of parting with the _crape hat_.... What can the thickest, heaviest crowns, said he, which have been exhibited to me in my travels, weigh in the one scale,--even supposing one should throw in also several tiaras and doges' caps with bows and papal hats,--if Clotilda's crape hat weighs down the other? As the reader has quite as much intelligence as I, let him decide the question.--This hat gave him an inexpressible longing for Maienthal, and was to him a dedicatory copper-plate which (as by an _investitura per pileum_) first presented Clotilda to him; he stood before this crown as an heir to the crown--every minute drew his coronation-chariot--with two big drops of joy, which the happy eye could not hold, and said slowly, gently shaking his head: "No, kind destiny gives me too much.--Ah, how can I deserve this soul from heaven?--I will merely say to her, I am thine! and by and by, some day, Thou art mine!" And when his fancy actually opened behind the crape-latticework the two great eyes which had once concealed behind it the tears of a rejected heart, and when he let the remote voice discourse again out of shadowy threads behind this nunnery-grating, then he could no longer restrain himself from writing,--so that he might thus go to Maienthal,--as he sat opposite the hat, his first letter to her, which I shall certainly get from the dog by to-morrow evening's post.--

I believe I have not yet said that Agatha handed him the hat, and that she invited him--it is now towards the end of April--to the birthday of her father on the 4th of May. Victor thought on the melancholy 4th of May of the year '92, and grew still more full of yearning for the friend who was torn from him.

Before closing the chapter, I will only say to the younger Clotildas, the Vice-Clotildas, the illegitimate Clotildas, and the Counter-Clotildas, who have me and my chapters in their laps: Be cool. You cannot possibly carry the coldness of virtue too far, unless you absolutely set no limits to it. I will, on your account, dress up this doctrine in wise sayings and witty sentences, that it may be the better adapted to fans and albums.

Love, like the seed of the Auricula, must be sown on snow; both are warmed through by ice itself, and then spring up so much the more vigorously.--You must never give yourselves as a mere present, but as a lady's acknowledgment of thanks to her knight.--You receive and deserve exactly as much respect as you demand, and you can, though you should be _alloyed_ as much as you pleased, take your mint-die or coin-stamp out of your pocket and coin yourselves therewith as a _lady d'or_ for one gentleman, or as a miserable little _fat-mannikin_[58] for another.--A rake indicates in a company, like a measurer of the purity of the air, by the different degrees of his boldness, the different degrees of female merit, only in inverse relation....

Even if it did not belong to the female point of honor, one must still desire, merely for the sake of having one trouble more,--because, my sex thinks on this subject entirely with me, who desire a daughter from no recruiting-house of sons-in-law, where at least the parents have not something against me;--and let it hereby be known (therefore I do not insert it in the newspaper) that I expect of parents, who in their auction-room of daughters, in their love-inoculation-hospital, have one or two subjects to dispose of, and to whom a Mining-Superintendent, Justice, Music-Master, and Biographer--such may be my few offices--is no too contemptible match,--that I [I repeat] expect of such parents, that (if they mean the thing seriously) they will at least forbid me the house or frequent correspondence:--that enlivens sons-in-law.

30. DOG-POST-DAY.

Letters.

Had I or any one else been lying in wait behind a bush or in a narrow pass, and had we darted out in the nick of time, we might have taken away the two letters, sealed up one into the other, which Victor was sending to Maienthal, from the hands of the messenger, who understood no German, namely, his Italian servant. The letter to Emanuel was the wrapper of the letter to Clotilda,--friendship is always the envelope of love. Of the wrapper I will give only an extract before I communicate in full the letter to Clotilda. He begged his Emanuel to take this only as a letter-cover, and to hand the enclosed to Clotilda alone;--he told him without further explanation he was held not by his own wishes, but by flowery chains which drew him back from the other chains of flowers in Maienthal, and that a manifold fettering with garlands was something one _could_ not break through, because one _would_ not,--he was intentionally obscure in regard to his new connection with Clotilda, because he could not presume upon her permission of the contrary;--he playfully begged his friend to beg his lady-friend to command him to make the journey to Flachsenfingen, that they might get a sight of each other,--(I lose my way in this period if I show the design of this way of putting the thing);--he erased again in his head the question, whether Clotilda still needed the physician, merely because he was one for her in a double sense, and only asked whether she had recovered.--Finally he concluded thus:--

"And thus then I flutter with tolerably dusted butterfly's[59] wings in the immense temple which to our butterfly[60] eyes breaks up into smaller ones, and the leafy ornaments of whose columns we take for the columns themselves, and whose rows of pillars become invisible from their greatness; there flutters the human butterfly[61] up and down,--strikes against windows,--rows through dusty cobwebs,--flaps his wings at last around a hollow flower,--and the great organ-tone of the eternal harmony tosses him about with merely a _dumb_, rising and falling tempest, which is too great for a mortal ear.

"Ah, now I know life! Were not man even in his desires and wishes so _systematic_,--did he not in all things aim at roundings-off as well of his Arcadias as of the kingdom of truth,--then he might be happy and brave enough for wisdom. But a looking-glass wall of his _system_, a living hedge of his _paradise_, neither of which lets him _sally_ or _see_ into the infinite, fling him back forthwith to the opposite side, which receives him with new railings and throws in his way new limits.... Now, when I have gone through such various states, passionate, wise, foolish, æsthetic, stoic; now that I see that the most perfect of them crooks and cripples either my earthly roots in the earth, or my twigs in the ether, and that, even if it did not do that, still it could not last over an hour, to say nothing of a life;--as, therefore, I clearly see that we are a fraction only and not a unit, and that all reckoning and reduction of the fraction is only an approximation between numerator and denominator, a change of the 1000/1001 into 10000/10001, I say: 'Well, for all me--be it so! Let wisdom, then, be for me the _finding out_ and _enduring_ of merely the _least_ gaps in our knowing, enjoying, and doing.' Accordingly, I no longer let myself be led astray, nor my neighbor either, by that most common illusion, that man regards every change in himself--every improvement at all events, but also even every deterioration--as greater than it afterward proves.

"--Enough! but since this observation--and still more since high destiny has given me joys, _in order that_ I might deserve them--new morning-light has fallen on my shady path, and I have new courage to improve myself. The clear stream of time runs over a sloping flower-bed of fair hours, on which I once stood, and upon which I can distinctly look down.--O when this Eden-lawn once comes up again, and I can take thy hand and walk upon it, and kneel down beside thee and look gratefully now to the morning-sky and now over the waving flower-fields of this life; then will I fall back upon thee speechless, and gratefully embrace thy breast, and say: 'O my Emanuel! only through thee do I indeed deserve it all.' Nay, I say it to-day, beloved teacher, and do thou stay a good long while by the side of thy scholar on the earth, even until he is worthy to accompany thee out of it."--

* * * * *

Long as this letter was, still Victor after all loved his teacher too much,--and hated too much the princely rudeness of making men tools,--not to have told him outright, that this letter owed--not so much its origin as--its birthday to the letter to his beloved. Here is the one to Clotilda, into which with the following words he brings his request to see her:--

"If I knew that I should even for a moment oppress or disturb by this sheet the beloved soul, which will now be enjoying itself by the side of the lofty Emanuel, in the presence of spring and amidst its fair thoughts, O most gladly would I sacrifice this blessed hour, in order, perhaps, to deserve it. But no, my friend forever! your tender heart desires not my silence! Ah, man must so often conceal coldness and bitterness, why, too, even love and joy?--Nor should I be able to do it today.

"O, if an inhabitant of earth had in a dream gone through Elysium; if great unknown flowers had waved above him; if a saint had handed him one of these flowers with the words, 'Let this remind thee when thou awakest that thou hast not dreamed!'--how would he pine for the Elysian land, as often as he looked upon the flower! Never-to-be-forgotten one! you have, in the glimmering night, when my heart twice succumbed, but only once from pain, given a mortal an Eden, which reaches out beyond his life; but to me it has seemed till now as if I were waking more and more out of the receding dream-night,--when, lo! I received from the paradisiacal dream a flower,[62] which you left behind for me, that I might remain inexpressibly happy, and that my longing might be as great as my bliss. Why does this crape draw up all the hot tears out of the depth of my heart, why do I see behind this woven lattice the eyes open, which are so far from me, and which so move my inmost being to sadness? O, nothing appeases the loving soul, but what it shares with the loved one; therefore do I gaze upon the spring with such a sweet stir of emotion; for she enjoys it, too, I say,--therefore it is that thou pleasest me so, dear moon, with thy evening star; for thou weavest the web of thy silver-threads round her shadows also and her May-flowers,--therefore it is that I so love to bury myself in every shaded dell of your Eldorado; for I think, in the magnified shadows, in the fragrance-breathing blossoms of these pictures, she is now roaming, and the moon-sickle deflects the softened lightnings of the sun upon her eye. Then when I am too full of joy, when the _evening-rain_ of memory falls upon the hot cheeks, when my rapture rocks up and down on a single long trembling tri-clang of the harpsichord, then does the trembling and the silence and the infinite love too heavily oppress with woe the tumultuous heart, then do I yearn for the least sound, wherewith I may tell the beloved of my heart how I _love her_, how I honor _her_, that for _her_ I will live, for _her_ will die!----O my dream, my dream steals now like a tear into my heart! In the night of the third Easter-holiday I dreamed: Emanuel and I stood in a dusky nocturnal region. A great scythe on the western horizon flung flying, reflected flashes at the high lawns, which forthwith dried up and turned pale. But when a flash flickered into our eyes, our hearts, sweetly fainting, drew themselves up in the breast, and our bodies grew lighter for soaring away. 'It is the scythe of Time,' said Emanuel, 'but whence does it, haply, catch the reflection?' We looked toward the east, and there hung far in the distance and high in the air a broad dark-glowing land of vapor, which occasionally lightened. 'Is not that Eternity?' said Emanuel. Then fell before us light snow-pearls, like sparks. We looked up and three gold-green birds of paradise poised themselves overhead and swept round incessantly in a little circle, one after the other, and the falling pearls came from their eyes, or were their eyes themselves. High above them stood the full moon in the blue, but on the earth there was still no light, but a blue shadow: for the blue of heaven was a great blue cloud, opened only in one place by the moon, which poured down radiance on the three birds of paradise, and down below on a bright form averted from us.--_You_ were that form, and turned your face toward the East, toward the hanging landscape, as if you would presently see something there. The birds of paradise sprinkled their pearls faster and faster into your eyes; 'They are the tears which our friend must shed,' said Emanuel; and then, too, they fell from your eyes, but more brightly, and lay glittering on the flowery ground. The blue on the earth suddenly grew brighter than the blue in the heavens, and a steep cavern, whose mouth yawned towards Eternity, sank back deeper and deeper through the earth towards the west, down even to America, where the sun shone from below into the opening,--and a stream of evening-red, broad as a grave, shot upward out of the earth, and diffused itself with its evening sheen over the far haze-land of the vapory Eternity like thin flames. Then trembled your outspread arms, then trembled your songs full of blissful longing, then could we and you see perfectly the illuminated Eternity. But it shifted with playing colors under the gaze, we could not retain even in thought what we saw; they were elusive forms and dissolving hues, they seemed near, seemed far, seemed to be in the midst of our thoughts.---Little clouds going up from the earth floated around the glowing Eternity, and each bore a human being, standing upon it and singing, up to that luminous island, which clove itself open toward the earth, with only an endless row of white trees, moulded of light and snow, and instead of blossoms putting forth purple flowers.--And we saw our three shadows lying sublimely projected on the radiant white grove; and on Clotilda's shadow the purple flowers hung down as garlands; an angel hovered round the lovely shadow and smiled upon it tenderly and touched the place of the heart upon it. Then didst thou suddenly tremble, Clotilda, and turn round towards us, fairer than the angel in Eternity; thy whole ground gleamed under the fallen tears and became transparent. And now when thy dropping pearls dissolved the ground into a rising cloud, then didst thou hastily reach thy hand to us, and say, The cloud takes me up, we shall see each other again.--Ah! my fainting heart no more retained its blood: I knelt down, but I could say nothing; I would fain have melted my soul into a single sound, but the fettered tongue could not frame one, and I stared at the ascending immortal with infinite and inconsolable love.--Ah! thought I, life is a dream; but I could perhaps say to her how I love her, were I only awake.

"Then I woke. O Clotilda, can man say how much he loves?

"H."

* * * * *

His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of invention.--For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of which was mustering material for an avalanche,--one is perhaps already started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime, Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or other--merely because he stands not with the rest on the social isolating stool of the throne--must soon dart a diminished flash at his fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed fox who pronounces _sour_ grapes, because he cannot reach them by leaping, to be _sweet_! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.--By heaven! a man will surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.--Only my father,--if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[63] for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his return is not to be had.

But deuse a bit does a Pastor-fido care for the first avalanche. On the harmonica-bells of his fancy the external dissonances of fate, as the rolling of carriage-wheels over the pavement does on the strings of a musical instrument, die away in softly ascending murmur. With him, as with the astrologers, April, like my book, was dedicated to the evening-star, i. e. to Venus.

On the contrary, the other avalanche lay already beforehand on his breast,--the possibility of a breach with Clotilda's brother. A jealous man the twelve Apostles and the twelve minor Prophets cannot convert;--if he is cured on Sunday, then on Monday he is sick again, on Tuesday he is raving mad, and on Wednesday you can loose him again; he is weak and cunning and----only lies in wait. The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. This time, furthermore, there was something true at the bottom; and then too the jealous man insures it in good season; jealousy enforces infidelity, and the provoked woman will not, so far as in her lies, leave the man in _error_. I cannot give myself the trouble (but the reader may) to enumerate in my biography all the little crannies and wood-holes through which he has hitherto let his Flamin see and _hear_ into his love-smitten heart: these knot-holes are so much the larger, as he was _before_ the _third_ Easter-holiday more improvident, for the very reason that he was more innocent, or, rather, more unhappy.

To this add, that Flamin--who every day thought the dear Evangelist Mattheus more honest and _open_ (like a burnt-out _touchhole_)--every day looked upon his faithful Bastian as more artful and impenetrable. I could wish the Regency-Councillor were more discerning; but crowded souls like Victor's, that have more powers, and for that very reason more sides, than common, seem, of course, to be less _porous_, just as authors full of meaning seem less clear. A man who exposes to you with frankness all the colors of his heart playing into each other, loses thereby the glory of frankness;--one who like Victor, from humor, collects and shows up other people's tricks, seems to imitate them;--a changeable, an ironical, a fine man is in the eyes of narrow ones a thorough-going false thief. Then, too, Victor, when it could be done without noise, jumped out of the way of any long mentionings of Clotilda, i. e. long dissemblings; and this very flight from artifice, even his present increased human-kindliness toward Flamin, precisely overshadowed his noble form; and nothing consoled him for the distortions of suspicion, but the sweet reflection that to please the brother of his beloved and of his heart he had turned his back upon the fairest days in Maienthal.

31. DOG-POST DAY.

Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes
in the Band of Friendship.

I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I needed _Herrnschmidt's osculologia_[64] for my (learned) labors,--that is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times, they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w----, the statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies more with the artists than with the models, not only the models themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic than the heroines of them,--more refined and reserved. The Mining-Superintendent will here--without any design of having eight distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob--swear a printed oath (or simply _swear_ in print) that he has found most of his contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[65] can draw them. In fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular cartilages to the windpipe,--that is, in all, twenty, probably for the sake of their more speaking,--whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose breast-bones are softer than men's,--how such human beings of the female sex can still send their maid or footman to a circulating library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill--in reference to women I am, according to miners' language, one of the _feather_,[66] not of _fire_ nor of _leather_--are elected for the education of female readers, as, according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations, for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils.

Every woman is finer than her station. She gains more by culture than the man. The female angels (but so also the female devils) are kept only in the highest and finest human drawers; they are butterflies, on whom the velvet-wing between two rough man's-fingers becomes a naked, skinny flap; they are tulips, whose colored leaves a single grasp of fate rubs down into a smutty leather.----

I bring forward all this, in order that Herr Kotzebue and the shameless Poets'-corner in Jena[67] and the whole romantic crew may not take it ill of my Clotilda that she imitates more her own sex than the aforesaid tribe, and so much the more, as she can allege in her defence, that she has not yet read this.

Through Agatha came very soon an answer from Clotilda, superscribed by Emanuel, which was inwardly sealed in the style of ambassadors, geometrically cut, and calligraphically written, because ladies execute all things that require the attention of the senses better than we, and because they--for hardly four of my acquaintance need I except--are exactly the opposite of men, in that the better they think, the finer they write. Lavater says the handsomest painter produces the handsomest pictures; and I say, fair hands write a fair hand.

Clotilda's letter sets itself with an ornamental belt and a live hedge full of blossoms across our Doctor's path and shuts him off from Maienthal. For it runs thus:--

"MOST WORTHY FRIEND,--

"Perhaps no maiden is so happy as a poetess; and I think, here in this charming valley one at last becomes both. You are happy everywhere, for you can be a poet even at a court, as your beautiful poetic epistle shows me. But fancy loves to paint from paint-boxes,--the true Maienthal cannot give yours so much as you know how to put into the three landscape-pictures of it. As often as you and I are obliged to make good the absence of the same things by imagination: only with you is the compensation greater than the sacrifice.

"If I could by persuasion have procured you the pleasure of seeing Herr Emanuel, gladly would I have done it; but I was at last, from conscientious scruples, not eloquent enough to induce him to make the journey, which would expose his weak breast to the danger of bleeding to death. Regard him as a Spring, for which every year one must wait nine months.

"Ah, my anxiety for my unforgettable and irreplaceable teacher casts a shadow over the whole present Spring, as a monument does over a flower-garden. I have never looked upon a Spring so gladly and joyfully as on this.--I can often, even by moonlight, go out along the brooks, and look for a flower which trembles beside the liquid mirror, and around which a moon above and another below fling their lustre, and I represent to myself the floral festival in the East, at which (as they say) a mirror and two lights are placed by night around every garden-flower. And yet I cannot look over to the flower-beds of my teacher, without being too much affected by the thought, Who knows whether his tulips will not stand longer than his crippled form? Has then the whole medical art no remedy that shall frustrate his hope of death?--It seems to me he is gradually attuning me to his melancholy tone, whereby I should make myself ridiculous before any other than the friend of Emanuel; but a still, hidden joy loves to break out even into melancholy. 'Only in the cold, not in the fair season of our destiny,' you once said, 'do the warm drops pain us, which fall from the eyes upon the soul, just as only in winter one must not sprinkle flowers with warm water.' And why should I not disclose to your open heart all the weaknesses of mine? This chamber, wherein my Giulia ended her beautiful life, even this looking-glass which, when I turned away for pain from her dying, showed me once more my pale and fading sister, the windows, from which my eye so many times a day must fall upon a mournful, thornful rose-bush, and on an eternally closed mound, all these may, indeed, cause my heart some sighs more than a happy one should otherwise have. I know not whether you or Emanuel said, 'The thought of death must be only our means of improvement, not our end and aim; if the earth of the grave falls into the heart, just as when it falls into the heart-leaves of a flower, it destroys instead of fructifying it';--but on my leaves fate and Giulia have already thrown some earth.--And I gladly bear it, as I can now, since gaining your friendship, flee for refuge to a heart, before which I may dare to open mine, in order to show it therein all the woes, all the sighs, all the doubts, all the questions of an oppressed soul. O, I thank the All-Gracious, that as much as he threatens to snatch from me in the person of my _teacher_, so much he gives me again already in advance in the person of his _friend_.--My friendship will reach after our Emanuel even into the next world, and will accompany his darling through this; and if one day the double stroke of his death should fall on us both, then would we shed more patiently our united tears, and I should perhaps say, Ah! his friend Sebastian has lost more than his friend CLOTILDA!"

* * * * *

The beating of my own heart, a stranger's, is to me a measure of the beating of the happier one. But before I relate what at the outset disturbed, and then doubled Victor's joy over this letter, let me be allowed to make two good observations. The first is: the enhanced sensibility, in a proud bosom (such as Clotilda's), which otherwise would call back sighs and send out only female satires at us lords of the creation, is the fairest token that her heart is melting in the sunshine of love. For this sentiment reverses women; it makes out of a Columbine a female Young, out of an orderly a disorderly one, out of a fine woman a frank one, out of a maker and wearer of finery a female philosopher, and so _vice versâ_. And do thou, dear Philippina, prove the second remark, for thou answerest here as well as thy own brother: Is not the concealment of love the sweetest confession of it? Does not a veil--a moral one, I mean--show the whole face, and is it not permeable to everything except the wind,--the moral wind, I mean?--Does not the glass case of a lady's watch reveal the whole varnished watch-portrait at the bottom, and exclude merely _soiling_, not _seeing_? And what observations wilt thou make, when I rehearse to thee these two!

The letter strengthened at once Victor's wish to be about Clotilda, and his power to give it up,--until, the next day at supper-time, an accident changed all. Matthieu, who paid almost more visits to enemies than to friends, came up from the Apothecary's. He saw the views of Maienthal and the crape hat; and as he knew that his sister Joachime had both, he said jokingly, "I fancy, you are going to dress yourself up in borrowed robes, or somebody has been disrobing." Victor fluttered away over the subject with a gay, vacant "Both." He was unwilling to take upon his lips the name of love or of a woman before a man who had no faith in virtue, least of all in woman's, who, to be sure, as other spiders do on other music, let himself down by his threads upon love, but who, as mice do, from love for the tones, crept over the strings and snapped them. Victor never loved (before his court-life) to be with such philosophical defamers among blameless maidens, because it pained him even to be reminded of their point of view. "They must not," said he, "learn so much as the existence of a daughter of mine, because they insult a father in the very act of imagining her to themselves."

Matthieu spoke of the next Patriotic Club (on the 4th of May, the birth-day of the Parson) and asked whether he would be there. Agatha, however, had already reminded him of it yesterday (the last day but one of April). At last Mat proposed his question, "Whether he would not also be of the party at Whitsuntide. He had planned a little excursion with the Regency-Councillor (Flamin), who always needed holidays for that purpose, to Grosskussewitz to the Count of O.'s. He had business there, to pay for some lodgings of the court to the Kussewitzers, and put the Count of O. in tune for an amicable adjustment of the recent misunderstanding; therefore he must have the lawyer with him. Perhaps the Englishmen would be at this Congress,--the travelling corps might then have as great entertainment as a _corps diplomatique_, after having first had just such occupation as theirs. The Count of O., in fact, loved Englishmen very much, though he did not like to ride English horses,--for he had been very sorry that he had lately talked with the distinguished Court-Physician at the Princess's without knowing you." Sebastian had concluded his long, dumb attention with a cold "No!" because the perspiration of this false, flying cat[68] overspread his unprotected heart with an eating poison. "What have I done to this man," thought he during that invitation, "that he pursues me eternally,--that with a knife, of which one side is poisoned, or both, he cuts away, amidst the double pangs of both of us, my youth's friend from my soul,--that he runs out his mines even to strange places, in order in all situations to have me over his powder?" Victor had, namely, after all, reason to fear that the Whitsuntide journey was a voyage of discovery, upon which Joachime might propound to her brother, as Chevalier Michaelis[69] did to the Oriental travellers, questions about the case of the watch-letter, about Tostato, &c., in order, perhaps, to form out of it all an impeachment before the Prince. He held the lower side of his card, i. e. of his _virtuous pain_, in such a way that Matthieu could not quite see it, so as to deprive him of a _malicious pleasure_. The latter, who wore not a lace mask, but an iron one, and besides one with a neck, showed often such coldness, that one did not comprehend his furious wrath and _vice versâ_,--but the one (the coldness) he had in camp, the other (the wrath) in the fight against the foe. If any one immediately enraged him, it was a good sign, and meant that he had no design against him.

After the evacuation of the Evangelist,--when he had done scolding at himself for letting him find the crape hat, which, in fact, he would have kept more concealed if Flamin had came oftener,--he looked round for Clotilda's profile, that the charming shadow might cool his wrath. It was not to be found: his first hypothesis was that Mat had quietly stolen it, which was the more likely, as he had cut it. If he has really pocketed the profile, then must the Evangelist--for, as is well known, the silhouette was made over _to me_ at the very beginning of this story--be actually my corresponding fellow-member Knef, and it is he who sent me the advice-boat,--namely, the Pomeranian dog.--Odd enough it is that my correspondent himself by such intelligence sets me upon the suspicion.

While Victor took the dear crape hat into his hand as a compensation for the likeness, and dreamily contemplated it, there sprang forth on the hat wholly new, fresh flowers for his soul. "What!" he said to himself, "must I then have only the profile to look at? Can I not choose the--original itself for that purpose?" In short, the hat became an urn of fortune, from which he drew a joyous hour, that is the determination to travel on Whitsuntide, but to--Maienthal. He seriously reflected, that for him and Clotilda this excessive indulgence of a jealous brother, whose mistaken hopes no sister indeed was obliged to strengthen, was besides aggravated and frustrated by the misanthropic suggestions of Matthieu,--that, therefore, their separation was as little of an alleviation as their meeting was a crime,--that, meanwhile, it would be a fine thing to spare the brother and to take merely the time of his absence for a suspicious excursion, till one day the drawing down of the bandage should disclose in the unfaithful one the sister, and in the rival the forbearing friend,--and that it was at all events better to talk with her in Maienthal than, at his return, when he was near,--and that a brother enlightened in regard to his origin would certainly one day have nothing to reproach him with, except that he had taken from him no other illusions than, at most, disagreeable ones.--O, Love and Virtue have a naked conscience, and apologize for their heavenly pleasures longer and more than other qualities do for their infernal ones!

When Victor further thought on _this_, how soon leaf and blossom drop off from the days of love, and that Emanuel, and even Clotilda, were two flowers moved close to the brink of the grave, whose loose, naked roots already hung down dead, then was his resolution fixed, and he wrote to Emanuel the intelligence of his intended arrival at Whitsuntide, in order not to anger Clotilda by a surprise, and in order, besides, to allow her the opportunity of a countermand. The way in which he put it was this: "If his Socratic genius would allow it (i. e. Clotilda), who always told him what he must _not_ do, then he was coming on Whitsuntide, as, besides, the town would then be deserted, as Flamin was to be gone for four or five days to Kussewitz, &c."

When he had finished the letter, it occurred to him that this very day a year ago; on the 29th of April, he had travelled all night, in order with the first of May in the morning to enter through the mist into the parsonage. "I can, verily, again spend the sultry zephyr-night, not under the coverlet, but under the stars. I can take one steady gaze into the evening-red towards Maienthal's mountains. I can, indeed, better still, go half the way over them,--or in fact the whole. I can post myself on a hill and look down into the hamlet. Truly I can then deliver my billet here incognito to some Maienthaler, and take flight again before it is yet day."

At seven o'clock in the evening he went, like the sea, from east to west. Orion, Castor, and Andromeda glisten in the west, not far from the evening-red, over the fields of the loved one, and, like her, will soon sink from one heaven into another. His heart agitated by nothing but hopes, the _heated_ chambers of his brain, on whose walls Maienthal sketched with _sympathetic_ ink came forth in ever clearer outlines and brighter colors, this inner and almost painful din of joy deprived him at first of the power of taking in the temple of Spring, built up in Grecian beauty, with a still, luminous soul. Nature and Art are best enjoyed only with a clean eye, from which both kinds of tears have been wiped away.

But at last the outspread _night-piece_ covered over his hot _fever-images_, and heaven with its lights, and earth with its shadows, made their way into his expanded heart. The night was without moonlight, but without clouds. The temple of nature, like a Christian temple, was sublimely dimmed. Victor could not make his way up out of the trenches of long valleys, out of the glooms of woods, and out of the mists of meadows with their play of colors, till the midnight hour, when he climbed a mountain like a throne, and there lay down on his back in order to plunge his eyes into the heavens, and cool off from his dreaming and racing. The low-hanging blue of heaven seemed to him to be a thin blue cloud, a sea dashed into blue mists, and one sun after another with its long rays slightly parted this blue flood. Arcturus, who stood over against the reclining man, was already descending from the battlements of heaven, and three great constellations, the Lynx, the Bull, and the Great Bear, marched far in the van under the western gate.--These nearer suns were encircled by remote milky-ways with a swimming halo, and thousands of vast heavens flung into eternity stood in our heaven as white vapors a span in length, as faintly luminous snow-flakes out of immensity, as silver circles of hoar-frost.--And the strata of suns crowded together, which only before the thousand-eyed eye of Art let fall their misty veil, played like streaks of _our_ little particles of sun-dust in the glowing sunbeam of the Eternal that burned through the immeasurable space. And the reflection of his throne, glowing through and through, lay bright on all the suns.----

--Suddenly, nearer at hand, molten cloudlets of light, nearer mists, which had flown upward out of dew, take their stations, during their silvering, low down before the suns, and the silvery gleam of heaven comes on apace with scattered dark fleeces.----Victor cannot comprehend the supernatural kindling, and starts up, enchanted, to his feet.... and lo, our good neighbor and kinsman, the moon, the sixth grand division of our little earth, had silently, and without the morning's cry of joy, entered _beside_ the triumphal gate of the sun into the night of her mother earth with her _half-day_.

And now, when the shadows ran off from all the mountains, and glided through the discovered landscapes only in brooks between trees, and when the moon gave the whole dark spring a little morning in the midnight,--then did Victor, not with nightly melancholy, but with morning rejuvenescence take the great round play-room of the annual creation into his awakened eyes, into his awakened soul; and he surveyed the spring with an internal cry of joy in the midst of the wide realm of profound silence, with the feeling of immortality in the circle of sleep.----

Earth also, and not Heaven only, makes man great!