Chapter C: T. B (4)

But now I beg every one of my fair readers either to step into the shooting-house, or make the best of her way out of it with the soldier's wife, who is running on to tell the naughty thing to her gracious lady,--for few of them can stand it out with me to see our hero, the male support of _Titan_, firmly planted by some farmers' boys--to whom, moreover, Albina has intrusted the _remarche-règlement_ of hastening his return--on a cross-stick, which is fitted in just under the crotch of the bird-pole, and with his belly bound down to it, and so lying horizontal in the air, gradually lifted through the wide sweep of the arch, and held up in mid-heaven. It is too bad! but the servants could not possibly resist the supplications of his mighty eyes, his picturesque will and spirit, and the offered recompenses and coronation-coins, in comparison with which he verily weighed only half as much as the last bird.

I am, nevertheless, partial to thee, little one, despite that stiff dare-neck of thine built up between head and heart. Thy monstrous Baroque-pearls of energies will time soon, as the artists in the Green Cellar do with physical pearls, use up in the finishing of a fine figure!

The imperial history of our imperial eagle on his pedestal, covering at the same time the events that took place on the mountain, when the Band-box master and Provincial Director came accidentally to the manned bird-pole, shall be incontinently resumed, when we have the 14th Cycle.

14. CYCLE.

Master Wehmeier, who could not at a distance explain to himself the form and motion of the bird, had made up towards it, and now saw his pupil lifted up on the cross. He fell instantly into the plunge-bath of an icy shudder at his daring, but soon came out of this into the shower-bath of a perspiring anxiety, which came over him at the thought of seeing every minute his _élève_ fall down and be crushed into twenty-six fragments, like Osiris, or into thirty, like the Medicean Venus; "and this too, now," he thought besides, "just as I have brought the young Satan so far along in languages, and lived to win some honor by him." He therefore scolded only the operators in the raising department, but not the sentinel aloft, because there was reason to apprehend he might take a lurch in the effort of answering, and pitch down. Hard upon the heels of the optical chariot with which the Devil threatened to run over the master, thus spell-bound in the circle of agonizing anxiety, followed a real one, wherein sat the future Provincial Director. Ah, good God! Besides, the Director always filled up his whole gall-bladder full of bitter extracts at the Minister's house, merely because he found there better-behaved and stiller children, without, however, reflecting--like a hundred other fathers who must be included in the charge--that children, like their parents, appear better to strangers than they are, and that, above all, city life, instead of the porous, thick bark of village life, overlays them with a smooth, white birch-roll, while yet, in the end, like their parents and courtiers, they prove to resemble chestnuts, being smooth only on the outer shell, but within confoundedly bristly. Thus surely will the finest man in the country always be outwitted by at least princes and ministers, who are ten years old,--supposing even he could manage it more easily with their fathers.

When Wehrfritz saw his foster-son in his eyrie on the Schreckhorn, and the Band-box master below, looking up at him, he imagined the instructor had arranged it all, and began loudly to vent upon his neck, from the locked-up carriage, a little heaven of thunder-storms and thunder-claps. The persecuted Wehmeier began also, upon the mountain, to bawl up at the Schreckhorn, by way of making it evident to the Director that he was in the way of his office, and with the hammer of the law, as with a forming stamp-hammer, could mould a pupil as well as another man. The soldier's wife wrung her hands,--the servants arranged themselves for the taking down from the cross,--the poor little fellow, in a fever, drew his knife, and called down, "He would instantly cut himself loose and cast himself down so soon as ever any one should let down the pole." He would have done it--and put an untimely end to his life and my Titan--merely because he dreaded the disgrace of the real and verbal insults he might get from his father before so many people (yes, in the chariot sat a gentleman who was a perfect stranger) worse than suicide and hell. But the Director, full of foolhardihood himself, and yet proportionately hating it in a child, was not to be disconcerted at that, and cried out, in a terrible tone, after the servant who had the key of the coach-door; he would get out and go up. He was indescribably exasperated, first, because behind the coach he had fastened on an Oesterlein's harpsichord as a gift for the present day of joy;--ah, Albano! why do thy joys, like the slurs of an ale-house fiddler, end in a discord?--and, secondly, because he had there a singing-dancing-music-and fencing-master from the polished and brilliant house of the Minister for Albano, sitting beside him on the cushion as spectator of this _début_. Gottlieb sprang from the box, and round before the coach-door, ran his hand, cursing, through all his pockets;--the coach-key was not in one of them. The incarcerated Director lashed himself up and down in his cage like a wagging leopard, and his fury was like that of a lion, who, when one hunter after another has shot at him, flies at the third. At all events, there was Alban, in his noose, sawing the air to and fro. The Band-box master was best off; for he was half dead, and his cold body, running all away in a sweat of agony, transmitted little more sense of the outward world; his consciousness was packed away tight and good as snuff in cold lead.

Ah, I feel more keenly for the tormented boy than if I were sitting with him up on the pole; over his touchingly noble countenance, with its finely-curved nose, shame and the western aurora throw a purple hue, and the low sun hangs with kisses on his cheeks, as if on the last and highest roses of the dark earth, and he must withdraw his defiant eyes from the beloved sun and from the day which still dwells thereon, and from the two steeple knobs of the Linden-city which glimmer on the sides turned from him, and sorrowfully cast down his strongly-drawn and sharply-angled eyebrows, which Dian likened to the too heroic and energetic ones of the infant Jesus in Raphael's ascending Madonna, to behold the hot and close altercation which was taking place on the ground below.

Gottlieb, with all his pains, could not squeeze out the key, for he had it in his pocket, and in his hand, and did not like much to produce it, from partiality for the young master, whom the whole service loved, "as if they could eat him,"--as much as they loved the nine-pin alley. He voted for sending and fetching the lock-smith, but the coachman outvoted him, with the advice to drive immediately to the door of the work-shop,--and growled at the horses, and drove off the imprisoned, controversial preacher in his pulpit, with the packed-up Oesterlein's harpsichord, at a smart trot. All that the Bombardier, during Gottlieb's mounting, had time to throw out of the carriage, consisted in his staving through a window, and firing, from the port-hole, a few of the most indispensable parting shots at the ill-omened bird on the pole.

By this time the magister had recovered his spirit and vexation, and boldly commanded the taking down of the Absalom. While the child came slowly down before him on his perch, he inserted the five incisor-teeth of his fingers, as a music-pen, into his scalp, and ruled or raked down along his occiput, with a view to playfully rectifying the crooked line of the hair, by pulling it moderately with his hand, as with the end of a fiddle-stick, when, to his astonishment, off came from my hero the Würzburg queue like a tail-feather.

Wehmeier stared at the _cauda prehensilis_ (the ring-tail), and by his attention's being thus drawn off to the lesser fault, Albano gained as much as Alcibiades did from the lopping off of the tail of his--Robespierre. The magister thanked God that he would not sup to-day with old Wehrfritz, and sent him, with his mock queue, brow-beaten, home.

15. CYCLE.

The good-hearted Albina had been all day long removing out of the way of her lord all inflammatory stuff (for the vitriol naptha of his nervous spirit caught the fire of anger afar off), in order that nothing might transform her pleasure-castles into incendiary places of joy,--yes, as a sort of suburbs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the evening, Rabette had packed away an orchestra of miners that had chanced to pass by, in the cabinet of the dining-room,--and for Albano Albina had already contrived an heraldic costume, in which he should deliver to him the _vocation_ of the Province. Ah, but what did the lady get from it all but flames, which Wehrfritz vomited forth at his entrance, while he, as a camel in his maw, had laid up besides, a long, cold stream of water for the sprinkling of the magister?

Albina, who, like most women, took the gall-stone pelting of her husband for the fifty pounds of passengers' ballast, which, to a passenger in the marriage-stage-coach, go free, cheerfully gave him, at first, as ever, credit of being right, and concealed every tear of unhappiness, because cold sprinkling hardens men and salad,--then step by step she took back the right,--but made the blame at first mild on her tongue, as nurses make the washing-water of the children lukewarm in their mouths,--and at last said he should just give the child up to her.

But we are making old Wehrfritz swell under our hand to a dragon of the Apocalypse, to a beast of Gevaudan, and a tyrant, whereas he is in reality only a lamb with two little horns. Had he not on his birth-feast in the drudging year of his slaving life a claim upon one unburdened evening, at least with a child whom he loved more strongly than his own, and for whom he had loaded himself down with a harpsichord and a teacher? And had he not a hundred times forbidden him--though he himself dared and did too much--to imitate him, and risk himself upon horseback, or in a tempest, in a pouring rain, or in a snow-storm? And had he not just come from the pedagogical knout-master, the Minister, whose educational system was only a longer real territion and a shorter condemnation? And does not the sight of stern parents make one sterner, and of mild ones, on the contrary, milder?

Albano first met Rabette with his leathern hind-axle in his hand, on his defiant way to the father's study, and therefore to the court-martial punishment of a real revolutionary tribunal. But she caught him from behind, with the angelic greeting, "Art thou here, Absalom?" and set him down by force; and, after the necessary astonishment and questioning, tied on the _vena cava_ of his hair tightly and ungently, and showed up to him, in a fearful light, the whirlwind of paternal wrath that awaited him; and again, in a ludicrous light, the lull of the musical mountain-department, who, near the dining-room, that race-ground and hunting-ground of the Director, striding up and down in rage and impatience, were waiting with a pause for times of peace; and finally she released him with a kiss, saying, "I pity you, you rogue!"

He marched, with a defiance which the tightness of his hair aggravated, into the dining-room. "Out of my sight!" said the sparkling assailant. Alban instantly stepped back out of the door, enraged at the injustice of this wrath, and for that very reason the less troubled at its unhealthiness; for his benefactor kept passionately running up to the table, which was spread for the birthday feast, and, after an old bad habit of his, extinguishing the well-kindled lime-pit of his indignation with wine.

In a few moments the musical academy and mining company, transformed by their ill-humor into growling contra-bassists, struck up also. The time had been tedious to them in the dry cabinet, so the bassoonist and the violinist had taken it into their heads to entertain themselves with a low tuning. The Director, who could not comprehend what in the world that forlorn sound was that floated around him, took it for some time to be a melodious humming in his ears, when suddenly the hammer-master of the dulcimer let his musical hammer fall on the stringed floor. Wehrfritz in an instant tore open the doors, and saw before him the whole musical nest and conspiracy sitting in a circle, armed and waiting. He asked them, hastily, "What business they had in the cabinet?" and, after a flying donation of a few curses and cuffs, ordered the whole garrison, without any tinkling noise, with their leather aprons and _culs de Paris_, to take themselves off instantly.

Albina, with a tender look, beckoned her outlawed darling into her sewing-chamber, where she asked him, quite composedly, because she knew he would not lie, to tell the truth. After hearing his report, she represented to him a little his fault (although she blamed the present child, in comparison with the absent man, pretty much in the style in which she had previously blamed the present man, in comparison with the absent child), and still more the consequences; she pointed out (untying and tying again his cravat the while, and buttoning some of his waistcoat buttons) how her husband was disgraced in Albano's person before the second school-consul, (with four and twenty Fasces,) whom he had brought with him, the music- and dancing-master, Mr. Von Falterle, who was up-stairs dressing himself; how the dancing-master would certainly write all about it to Don Gaspard; and how for her good man the whole sweet, painted jelly-apple of to-day's joy had been turned into water: and now he must, even on this festive day, afflict his soul in solitude, and, perhaps, catch his death from drinking so much to drown his anger. Women, like harpers, usually, during their playing, convert, with small pedals, the whole tones of truth into semi-tones. After she had still further enumerated to him all the paternal evening-tempests which he had ever drawn upon himself by his rides and his Robinson's voyages of discovery, and whose thunder-claps had, on every occasion, only melted down the lightning-conductor (namely, herself), she added, with that touching tone flowing, not from the bony throat, but from the swelling heart, "Ah, Albano, thou wilt one day think of thy foster-mother, when it is too late!" and melted into tears.

Hitherto the unmeltable slags and the molten portion of his heart had been boiling up together within him, and the warm flood had pressed upward, ever higher and hotter, in his bosom, only his face had remained cold and hard,--for certain persons have, exactly at the melting point, the greatest appearance and capacity of hardening, as snow freezes just before a thaw; but now the strain upon the too tightly-bound queue, which was the paradoxical sign of the approaching eruption, made him, in the paroxysm of his fury, tear the Würzburg appendage off over his head. Before Albina saw it, she had handed him the Directorship appointment, with the words, "I ought hardly to do it; but just hand it to him, and say it was my present, and that thou wilt be quite another boy in future." But when she saw his hand armed, she asked, in a terrified tone, with the deep echo of a wearied-out grief, "Alban!" and turned immediately away from the poor child, whose pain she misunderstood, with too bitter tears, and said: "What new trouble is this? O, how you all torment my heart to-day! Go away! O, come here," she called after him, "and relate the circumstances!" And when he had innocently and truly done this, her voice, overpowered with tears, could no longer blame him, but only say, mildly, "Well, then, carry the present." Nevertheless, she had it in mind to represent to her husband the abbreviation of the hair as an act of obedience to her will, and to the fashion of city children in high life.

Alban went; but on the painful way, the full glands of his tears and his long-repressed heart broke forth, and he entered with eyes still weeping before his solitary foster-father, who was resting his tired and thinking head; and the boy held out to him, while yet a great way off, the big-sealed document, and could only say, "The present," and nothing more, and sparks darted with the storm-drops from his hot eyes. Lay thyself, innocent one, softly on thy father's unbuttoned bosom; and while he holds in his right hand the enchanted cup of glory, and makes himself drunk with it, let him not on any account push thee away with his left! The repelling hand will by and by come to pulsate languidly and lightly upon thy wet, fiery cheeks, and warm, penitent eyes: then will the old man read the _Decretum_ over again still more slowly, so as almost to postpone the very first sound; then will he, when thou, with indescribable impetuosity, pressest his hand to thy face to kiss it, make appear as if he had just awaked, and say, with saltpetre coldness and glistening eyes, "Call mother"; and then, when thou liftest upon him thy glowing countenance all quivering with love from under thy downfallen locks, and when they are flung softly back from thy cherry cheeks,--then will he look a pretty long time after his departing darling, and brush away something from his eyes, that he may run over the address of the diploma at his will.

Say, Albano, have I not guessed right?

16. CYCLE.

Every post of honor lifts the heart of a man who is placed on it above the vapor of life, the hail-clouds of calamity, the frosty mists of discontent, and the inflammable air of wrath. I will hold the magic leaf of a favorable criticism before a gnashing were-wolf: immediately he shall stand before me as a licking lamb, with little twirling tail; and if the wife of an author could only play before her heated literary partner every time a critical trumpeter's piece on Fame's trumpet, he would become like an angel, and she like that ale-house fiddler who, in his bear-catching, softened the Saul in Bruin by his jigs.

Wehrfritz came to meet Albina as a new-born seraph, and recounted to her his glory. Yes, in order to atone to her for the explosions of his Etna, he said not, as usual, _nolo episcopari_; he did not say he was hemmed round by an impassable mountain chain of labors; but, instead of that perverse drawing back of the hand from the out-shaking cornucopia of fortune,--instead of that virgin bashfulness of rapture which is more common to brides,--he betrayed the heartiness of a widow, and told Albina her wishes of the morning had already become gifts; and asked what had become of the promised supper, and the company, and the Magister, and the dancing-master (whom the other had not yet seen), and Rabette, and all.

But Albina had already long since announced to the Magister, through Albano, the invitation, and the dispersion of all storms, and the arrival of the new commission. Wehmeier, to tell the truth, had the greatest reluctance to eat with a nobleman, merely because, as entertaining _acteur_ of the table, he had so much to do with conversing, _savoir vivre_, looking out for others, keeping his limbs in proper attitude, and passing all eatables, that, for want of leisure, he was obliged to swallow such little things as pickled cucumbers, chestnuts, crabs' tails, and the like, down whole, and without tasting them; so that afterward he often had to carry round with him the hard fodder, like a swallowed Jonah, for three days together in the hunter's pouch of his stomach. Only this time he gladly dressed himself for the feast, because he was curious and angry about his pedagogical colleague, and that out of anxiety lest haply this new joint-tenant should assume to himself the magnificent _winter crop_ in Alban's sowed field as his own _summer crop_. He ascribed to his abbreviated method of teaching all the wonderful energies of his pupil, i. e. to the water-soil the aromatic essence of the plant which grew therein.[32]

With so much the greater indulgent love he came, leading with his own hand the halved pupil, to Rabette's cabinet, in a sap-green plush with a three-leaved collar. "Mr. Von Falterle here," said Rabette on his entrance, not from raillery, but from inconsiderateness; "thought some time ago it was you when the dog tried to get in." "My dear sir," replied coldly and gravely the _paradeur_ of a Falterle by the side of our farm-horse, "the dog scratched at the door; but it is usual, as well at the minister's as in all great houses of Paris, for every one to scratch with the finger-nail when he wishes admittance merely into a cabinet, and not into a principal apartment."

What a splendidly picturesque contrast of the two brothers-in-office!--the master of accomplishments with the motley scarf-skin or hind-apron of a yellow summer-dress, as if with the yellow outer wings of a buttermoth, whose dark under-wings represent the waistcoat (when he unbuttons it); Wehmeier, on the other hand, in a roomy, sap-green plush, which a tent-maker seemed to have hung on him, and with belly and shanks quivering in the black velvet half-mourning of candidates, who wear it till they carbonize into clear black. Falterle had his glazed frost pantaloons plated and cast round his legs, and every wrinkle in them produced one upon his face, as if the latter were the lining of the former; while along the thighs of the Band-box-master wound upward the cockle-stairs of his swaddling modests.[33] The former in bridal-shoes, the latter in pump-chambers,--the one flapping up like a soft, slimy gold tench, with the belly-fins of his bosom-ruffles, with the side-fins of his hand-ruffles, and with the tail-fins of a trinomial root or queue hanging on three little ermine tails; the Magister, in his green plush, looking for all the world like a green whiting or a chub. A magnificent set-off, I repeat!

The whiting would gladly have eaten up the tench, when the goldfish led forth on his right arm Rabette, and on his left Albano, to dinner. But now it grew much worse. Alban, with his usual impetuosity, had his napkin open first,--which became now, as it were, introductory programme and dokimasticum of Falterle's system of teaching. "_Posément, Monsieur_," said he to the novice, "_il est messéant de déplier la serviette avant que les autres aient déplié les leurs_." After some minutes, Alban thought he would blow his soup cool; it was one _à la Brittanière_, with rings. "_Il est mésseant, Monsieur_," said the master of accomplishments, "_de souffler sa soupe_." The Band-box-master, who had already made up his mouth to vent a puff from the bellows of his chest at a spoonful of rings, stopped short, frightened into a dead calm.

When afterward a veal-stuffed cabbage-bomb fell like a central sun on the table-cloth, the Magister boldly gobbled down the burning minced veal, as a juggler or an ostrich swallows glowing coals, and breathed more inwardly than outwardly.

After the bomb, came in a pike _au four_, to which, as is well known, the cutting away of the head and tail, and the closing up of the belly give the appearance of a roe's loin. When Albano asked his old teacher what it was, the latter replied, "A delicate roe's loin." "_Pardonnez, Monsieur_," said his rival gourmand, "_c'est du brochet au four, mon cher Compte; mais il est mésseant de demander le nom de quelque mets qu'il soit,--on feint de le savoir_."

It is easy to show that this horizontal shot from a double rifle pierced through the Magister's marrow and bone; the _instruments of passion_ which lay in the cut-off head of the pike _au four_, as in an armory, continued to do their execution in his. Like most schoolmasters, he thought himself to have the finest manners, so long as he taught them, and fought against bad ones; so long he prized them uncommonly, just as he did his dress; but when he was outdone in either, then he must needs despise them from his heart. It brought him to his legs again that he was all the while silently comparing the master of accomplishments with the two Catos and Homer's heroes, who ate not much better than swine, and that he thus tied the Viennite to a pillory, and thrashed him most lustily thereon, with one hand, while with the other he rung above him the shame-bell. Yes, he placed himself, in order to make his official brother small, upon a distant planet, and looked down upon the bomb and the pike _au four_, and could not help laughing up there on his planet, to find that this yellow-silk shop-keeper of Nature, with his rubbish of brains, was no bigger than a paste-eel. Then he pitied his forsaken pupil, and so came down again, and swore on the way to weed as much out of him every day as that other fellow raked in.

We shall learn quite soon enough how Albano's nerves quivered on this lathe, and under these smoothing-planes. The Director was indescribably delighted with this pedagogical cutting and polishing of so great a diamond, although the cutting (according to Jeffries) takes from all diamonds half their weight, and although he himself had all his, and more carats than angles. Wehrfritz could never entirely forgive,--at which point he was now aiming, because he had brought with him for the little one the Oesterleins harpsichord,--until at least with one word he had inflicted a short martyrdom; accordingly, blind to Albano's concealed bloody expiation of the fault, he communicated to the company how strictly the Minister educated his children, how they, e. g., for any involuntary coughing or laughing at the table, like Prussian cavalry soldiers, who fall off or lose their hats in the wind, suffer punishment, and how they were, to be sure, no older than Albano, but quite as well-mannered as grown people. At the house of the Minister he had, on the contrary, boasted to-day the acquirements of his foster-son; but many parents build up in every other house smoking altars of incense for the same child, which in their own they smoke with brimstone, like vines and bees. Besides, deuse take it! they, like princes (fathers of their country), make redoubled demands precisely when children have satisfied immoderate ones; so that the latter, by _opera supererogationis_ in the shape of advanced lessons, forfeit rather than win their play-hours. Do we not admire it in great philosophers, e. g. Malebranche, and great generals, e. g. Scipio, that, after the greatest achievements which they made in the kingdom of truths, or in a geographical, they betook themselves to the nursery, and there carried on real child's fooleries, in order gently to relax the bow wherewith they had shot so many lies and liars to the ground. And why shall not this simile, wherewith St. John defended himself when he allowed himself a play-hour with his tame partridge, also excuse children for being children, when they have previously stretched too crooked the yet thin bow?

But now on with our story! Old Wehrfritz recounted to Rabette, in a very friendly manner, "how he had seen to-day the pupil of Don Zesara, the magnificent Countess de Romeiro, actually only twelve years old, but with such a deportment as only a court dame had, and how the noble Knight experienced more joy than usual in his little ward." These hard, clattering words tore, as if he had hydrophobia, the open nerves of the ambitious boy, since the Knight had hitherto been to him the life's-goal, the eternal wish, and the _frère terrible_, wherewith they kept him under,--but he sat still there without a sign, and choked his crying heart. Wehrfritz recognized this dumb lip-biting of feeling; however, he acted as if Albano had not understood him.

Now began the Viennite too, hurling about his fire-balls into all corners and niches of the Ministerial Vatican, merely to throw a favorable light upon his dancing and music scholars therein, as well as himself. Cannot the daughter of the Minister, hardly ten years old, speak all the modern languages and play on the harmonica, which Albano has never yet once heard, and even execute four-handed sonatas of Kotzeluch, and sing already like a nightingale, on boughs that have not yet put on their foliage too, and in fact passages from operas, which made her nightingale breast grow hollow, so that he had to leave? Yes, cannot her brother do far more, and has he not read out all the circulating libraries, particularly the plays, which he also performs on amateur stages into the bargain? And is he not at this precise hour making his case right good in to-day's masquerade ball, if he only meets there the object that inspires him? Wehmeier did wrong to sit opposite our jewel-humming-bird, Falterle, like a horned-owl or a bird-spider, ready to pluck and eat the humming-bird every minute. Verily, Falterle said nothing out of malice; he could not despise or hate anybody, because his mental eyes were so deeply buried in his own inflated "I," that he could not look with them at all out beyond his swollen self; he harmed no soul, and fluttered round people only as a still butterfly, not as a buzzing, stinging horse-fly, and sucked no blood, but only honey (i. e. a little praise).

"Pray, tell me, Mr. Von Falterle," said Wehrfritz, who, so soon as he had brought down this cold lightning-flash upon Albano, would no longer shoot cold and flying insinuations at him, "does the young minister sometimes sit on a bird-pole, like our Albano here?" That was too much for thee, tormented child! "No," said Albano, in a brassy tone, and with the friendliness of a corpse, which signifies another death to follow; and with an optical cloud of floating complexions, left the seat cracking under his dumb convulsions, and with clenched fingers went slowly out.

The poor young man had, to-day, since the apparent forgiveness of his Adamitish fall, and since the sight of the elegant new teacher, for whom he had so long rejoiced in hope, and whose fine copperplate encasement was just of a kind to have an imposing effect upon a child, cast off the last chrysalis-shell of his inner being, and promised himself high things. Some hand had within an hour snatched his inner man from the close, drowsy cradle of childhood,--he had sprung at once out of the warming-basket, had thrown stuffed-hat and frock far away from him,--he saw the _toga virilis_ hanging in the distance, and marched into it, and said, "Cannot I, too, be a youth?"

Ah, thou dear boy! man, especially the rosy-cheeked little man, too easily cheats himself with taking repentance for reformation, resolutions for actions, blossoms for fruits, as on the naked twig of the fig-tree seeming _fruits_ sprout forth, which are only the fleshy rinds of the _blossoms_!

And now, while all the nerves and roots of his soul lay naked and exposed to the harsh air, and with such fair, fresh impulses,--just now must he be so often trampled upon and disgraced. Honor burned in his bosom,--he determined to pass through the coming years as through a white colonnade of monumental pillars,--already a mere Alumnus from the city was, to his soul thirsting for glory and knowledge, a classic author,--and was he to endure it that the Director should falsely accuse, and the Vienna master caricature him to the Knight his father? Hard tears were struck, like sparks, from his proud, insulted soul, and the heat dissolved the comet nucleus of his inner world into a sweltry mist. In short, he resolved to run away to Pestitz in the night,--rush into his father's presence, tell him all, and then come home again without saying a word of it. At the end of the village he found a night-express, of whom he inquired the way to Pestitz, and who wondered at the little pilgrim without a hat.

But first let my readers look with me at the nest of the supper-party. This very express brought the Vienna master a bad piece of news touching the so-long-praised son of the Minister, whose name was Roquairol.

The above-mentioned female pupil of the Knight, the little Countess of Romeiro, was very beautiful: cold ones called her an angel, and enthusiastic ones a goddess. Roquairol had none of your Belgic veins, wherein, as in Saturn, all liquids lie as fixed, frozen bodies, but African arteries, in which, as in Mercury, melted metals run round. When the Countess was with his sister, he was always trying, with the common boldness of boys in high-life, to run his heart, filled with a venous system of quick matches, upon hers, as a good fireship; but she placed his sister as a fire-wall before her. Unfortunately she had gone, by chance, dressed as Werther's Lotta, to this evening's masquerade, and the splendor of her despotic charms was swallowed up and flashed round by eyes all darkly glowing behind masks: he took his inner and outer both off, pressed towards her, and demanded, with some haste--because she threatened to be off, and with some confidence, which he had won on the amateur-stage, and with pantomimic passionateness, which on that stage had always gained him the finest serenade of clapping hands--demanded nothing just now but reciprocal love. Werther's Lotta haughtily turned upon him her splendid back, covered with ringlets; beside himself, he ran home, took Werther's costume and pistol and came back. Then, with a physiognomical hurricane on his countenance, he stepped up before her and said, showing the weapon, he would kill himself here in the hall, if she rejected him. She looked upon him a little too politely, and asked what he wanted. But Werther, half drunk with Lotta's charms, with Werther's sorrows, and with punch, after the fifth or sixth "No!" (being already used to public acting,) before the whole masquerade, pointed the murderous weapon against himself, pulled the trigger, but luckily injured only his left ear-flap,--so that nothing more can be hung on that,--and grazed the side of his head. She instantly fled, and set out upon her journey, and he fell down, bleeding, and was carried home.

This story blew out many lamps in Falterle's triumphal arch, and lighted up many on Wehmeier's; but it set Albina at once into agony about her quite as wild mad-cap Albano. She asked after him in the kitchen, and the express-messenger helped her to a clew by his account of the boy without a hat. She hastened, herself, in her usual extravagance of anxiety, out through the village. A good genius--the yard-dog, Melak--had proved the antagonist-muscle and turnpike-gate of the fugitive. That is to say, Melak wanted to go too, and Alban chose rather that a patron and coast-guard so serviceable to the castle-yard, and who oftener warned away intruders than the night-watch did themselves, should go home again. Melak was firm in his matters: he wanted reasons,--namely, sticks and stones thrown at him; but the weeping boy, whose burning hands the cold nose of the good-natured animal refreshed, could not give him a hard word, but he merely turned the fawning dog right about, and said softly, Go home! But Melak recognized no decrees except loud ones; he kept turning round again; and in the midst of these inversions,--during which, in Albano's mind, always on a Brockenberg and seeing giant forms loom and glide through the clouds, his tears and every undeserved word burned deeper and deeper,--he was found by his innocent mother.

"Albano," said she, with a friendly but forced composure, "thou here in the cold night-air?" This conduct and language of the only soul which he had injured, took so strong a hold on his full soul, which needed a vent, whether in tears or in gall, that, with a spasmodic shock of his overstrained heart, he sprang upon her neck, and hung there, melted in tears. At her questions, he could not confess his cruel purpose, but merely pressed himself more strongly to her heart. And now came the anxious and penitent Director, too, following after, whom the child's situation had melted over, and said: "Silly devil! was my meaning then so evil?" and took the little hand to lead the way back again. Probably Albano's anger was exhausted by the effusion of love, and satisfied through the appeasing of his ambition; accordingly and immediately, strange to tell, with greater affection towards Wehrfritz than towards Albina, he went back with them, and wept by the way, merely from tender emotion.

When he entered the room, his face was as if transfigured, though a little swollen; the tears had washed away, as with a flood, his defiance, and drawn all his heart's soft lines of beauty upon his countenance, somewhat as the rain shows in transparent, trembling threads the heaven-flower (nostock), which does not appear in the sun. He placed himself in a posture of attention near his father, and kept his hand the whole evening, and Albina enjoyed in the double love a double bliss; and even on the faces of the servants lay scattered fragments of the third mock-rainbow of the domestic peace,--the sign of the covenant after the assuaging of the waters.

Verily, I have often formed the wish--and afterwards made a picture out of it--that I could be present at all reconciliations in the world, because no love moves us so deeply as _returning_ love. It must touch Immortals, when they see men, the heavy-laden, and often held so widely asunder by fate or by fault, how, like the Valisneria,[34] they will tear themselves away from the marshy bottom, and ascend into a fairer element; and then, in the freer upper air, how they will conquer the distance between their hearts and come together. But it must also pain Immortals when they behold us under the violent _tempests_ of life arrayed against each other on the _battle-field_ of enmity, under double blows, and so mortally smitten at once by remote destiny and by that nearer hand which should bind up our wounds!

FOOTNOTES:

[27] I have already said that he was brought up there, under the Provincial Director, _Von Wehrfritz_.

[28] With this Evangelist, as is well known, an angel is associated.

[29] Compass.

[30] Odious, or tabooed.--TR.

[31] To a German President of Finance, Vol. I. p. 296.

[32] For Boyle found in his experiments that ranunculi, mints, &c., which he suffered to grow large in the water, developed the usual aromatic virtues.

[33] Some would rather hear this word than _breeches_.

[34] The female Valisneria lies rolled up under the water, out of which it lifts its bud, to bloom in the open air; the male then loosens itself from the too short stalk and swims to her with its dry blossom-dust.

THIRD JUBILEE.

METHODS OF THE TWO PROFESSIONAL GARDENERS IN THEIR
PEDAGOGICAL GRAFTING-SCHOOL.--VINDICATION OF VANITY.--DAWN
OF FRIENDSHIP.--MORNING STAR OF LOVE.

17. CYCLE.

If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the _élève_, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female the latter.

Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore, had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can, under these circumstances, come out again into light?

But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)--lectured out to his Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?

Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history, on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?

The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the 22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the 29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is compelled to listen to the case.

This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange. He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning, walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen, ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within, although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher, as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality? Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so, from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss, roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full of broken inscriptions.

18. CYCLE.

The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the _élève_ is sent into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think of--and, therefore, to describe--in ancient history, than a great man, who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes, whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried _his_ shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on poles for show, and sketched, as a second _Scheiner_, the best map we have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked, rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice Nuremberg Kinder-gärten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would incline....

I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies, into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.

Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly, on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,--for children of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an _echo_,--apprehend what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when Alban was as _distrait_ and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo, Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors, when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna, "For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently encourage him to "quart thrust."

Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a _liberal_ soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature. Moreover, he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy _first love for men_ wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite about her ring-finger,--yes, inside of the gold ring itself,--and because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod the earth.

As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The sea-water of his life--for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the greatest _savant_ of the age, although he has read about among many circulating libraries--is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his prayers, and flatters very few except himself.

The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader, whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions, experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but for this further reason,--most sins are occasional sermons and occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word, cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal, margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many never at all,--for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night, summer and winter, in every place,--in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in any part of Germany,--for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man, be plucked up or lopped off?

19. CYCLE.