Chapter XV: Part 15

"O! now thou art angel-good!" said she, and gladder tears rolled down; "thou shalt counsel me thyself which are the finest Raths, and these we will be."

"No," continued I, in the fire of the moment, "neither shall this serve us: to me it is not enough that to Mrs. Chaplain thou canst announce thyself as Building-raethin, to Mrs. Town-parson as Legations-raethin, to Mrs. Buergermeister as Court-raethin, to Mrs. Road-and-toll-surveyor as Commerce-raethin, or how and where thou pleasest----"

"Ah! my own too good Attelchen!" said she.

"--But," continued I, "I shall likewise become corresponding member of the several Learned Societies in the several best capital cities (among which I have only to choose); and truly no common actual member, but a whole honorary member; then thee, as another honorary member, growing out of my honorary membership, I uplift and exalt."

Pardon me, my Friends, this warm cataplasm, or deception-balsam for a wounded breast, whose blood is so pure and precious, that one may be permitted to endeavour, with all possible stanching-lints and spider-webs, to drive it back into the fair heart, its home.

But now came bright and brightest hours. I had conquered Time, I had conquered myself and Berga: seldom does a conqueror, as I did, bless both the victorious and the vanquished party. Berga called back her former Heaven, and pulled off her dusty boots, and on her flowery shoes. Precious morning beverage, intoxicating to a heart that loves! I felt (if the low figure may be permitted) a double-beer of courage in me, now that I had one being more to protect. In general it is my nature--which the honourable Premier seems not to be fully aware of--to grow bolder not among the bold, but fastest among poltroons, the bad example acting on me by the rule of contraries. Little touches may in this case shadow forth man and wife, without casting them into the shade: When the trim waiter with his green silk apron brought up cracknels for breakfast, and I told him: "Johann, for two!" Berga said: "He would oblige her very much," and called him Herr Johann.

[Note 76: Your economical, preaching Poetry, apparently supposes that a surgical Stone-cutter is an Artistical one; and a Pulpit or a Sinai a Hill of the Muses.]

Bergelchen, more familiar with rural burghs than capital cities, felt a good deal amazed and alarmed at the coffee-trays, dressing-tables, paper-hangings, sconces, alabaster inkholders, with Egyptian emblems, as well as at the gilt bell-handle, lying ready for any one to pull out or to push in. Accordingly, she had not courage to walk through the hall, with its lustres, purely because a whistling, whiffling Cap-and-feather was gesturing up and down in it. Nay, her poor heart was like to fail when she peeped out of the window at so many gay promenading town's-people (I was briskly whistling a Gascon air down over them); and thought that in a little while, at my side, she must break into the middle of this dazzling courtly throng. In a case like this, reasons are of less avail than examples. I tried to elevate my Bergelchen, by reciting some of my nocturnal dream-feats; for example, how, riding on a whale's back, with a three-pronged fork, I had pierced and eaten three eagles; and by more of the like sort: but I produced no effect; perhaps, because to the timid female heart the battle-field was presented rather than the conqueror, the abyss rather than the overleaper of it.

At this time a sheaf of newspapers was brought me, full of gallant decisive victories. And though these happen only on one side, and on the other are just so many defeats, yet the former somehow assimilate more with my blood than the latter, and inspire me (as Schiller's _Robbers_ used to do) with a strange inclination to lay hold of some one, and thrash and curry him on the spot. Unluckily for the waiter, he had chanced, even now, like a military host, to stand a triple bell-order for march, before he would leave his ground and come up. "Sir," began I, my head full of battle-fields, and my arm of inclination to baste him; and Berga feared the very worst, as I gave her the well-known anger and alarm signal, namely, shoved up my cap to my hindhead--"Sir, is this your way of treating guests? Why don't you come promptly? Don't come so again; and now be going, friend!" Although his retreat was my victory, I still kept briskly cannonading on the field of action, and fired the louder (to let him hear it), the more steps he descended in his flight. Bergelchen,--who felt quite horrorstruck at my fury, particularly in a quite strange house, and at a quality waiter with silk apron,--mustered all her soft words against the wild ones of a man-of-war, and spoke of dangers that might follow. "Dangers," answered I, "are just what I seek; but for a man there are none; in all cases he will either conquer or evade them, either show them front or back."

[Note 115: According to Smith, the universal measure of economical value is _Labour_. This fact, at least in regard to spiritual and poetical value, we Germans had discovered before Smith; and to my knowledge we have always preferred the learned poet to the poet of genius, and the heavy book full of labour to the light one full of sport.]

I could scarcely lay aside this indignant mood, so sweet was it to me, and so much did I feel refreshed by the fire of rage, and quickened in my breast as by a benignant stimulant. It belongs certainly to the class of Unrecognised Mercies (on which, in ancient times, special sermons were preached), that one is never more completely in his Heaven and _Monplaisir_ (a pleasure-palace) than while in the midst of right hearty storming and indignation. Heavens! what might not a man of weight accomplish in this new walk of charity! The gall-bladder is for us the chief swimming-bladder and Montgolfier; and the filling of it costs us nothing but a contumelious word or two from some bystander. And does not the whirlwind Luther, with whom I nowise compare myself, confess, in his _Table-talk_, that he never preached, sung, or prayed so well, as while in a rage? Truly, he was a man sufficient of himself to rouse many others into rage.

The whole morning till noon now passed in viewing sights, and trafficking for wares; and indeed, for the greatest part, in the broad street of our Hotel. Berga needed but to press along with me into the market throng; needed but to look, and see that she was decorated more according to the fashion than hundreds like her. But soon, in her care for household gear, she forgot that of dress, and in the potter-market the toilette-table faded from her thoughts.

I, for my share, full of true tedium, while gliding after her through her various marts, with their long cheapenings and chafferings, merely acted the Philosopher hid within me: I weighed this empty Life, and the heavy value which is put upon it, and the daily anxiety of man lest it, this lightest down-feather of the Earth, fly off, and feather him, and take him with it. These thoughts, perhaps, I owe to the street-fry of boys, who were turning their market-freedom to account, by throwing stones at one another all round me: for, in the midst of this tumult, I vividly figured myself to be a man who had never seen war; and who, therefore, never having experienced, that often of a thousand bullets not one will hit, feels apprehensive of these few silly stones lest they beat-in his nose and eyes. O! it is the battle-field alone that sows, manures and nourishes true courage, courage even for daily, domestic and smallest perils. For not till he comes from the battle-field can a man both sing and cannonade; like the canary-bird, which, though so melodious, so timid, so small, so tender, so solitary, so soft-feathered, can yet be trained to fire off cannon, though cannon of smaller calibre.

[Note 4: The Hypocrite does not imitate the old practice, of cutting fruit by a knife poisoned only on the one side, and giving the poisoned side to the victim, the cutter eating the sound side himself; on the contrary, he so disinterestedly inverts this practice, that to others he shows and gives the sound moral half, or side, and retains for himself the poisoned one. Heavens! compared with such a man, how wicked does the Devil seem!]

After dinner (in our room), we issued from the Purgatory of the market-tumult,--where Berga, at every booth, had something to order, and load her attendant maid with,--into Heaven, into the Dog Inn, as the best Flaetz public and pleasure-house without the gates is named, where, in market-time, hundreds turn in, and see thousands going by. On the way thither, my little wife, my elbow-tendril, as it were, had extracted from me such a measure of courage, that, while going through the Gate (where I, aware of the military order that you must not pass _near_ the sentry, threw myself over to the other side), she quietly glided on, close by the very guns and fixed bayonets of the City Guard. Outside the wall, I could direct her with my finger, to the bechained, begrated, gigantic Schabacker-Palace, mounting up even externally on stairs, where I last night had called and (it may be) stormed: "I had rather take a peep at the Giant," said she, "and the Dwarf: why else are we under one roof with them?"

In the pleasure-house itself we found sufficient pleasure; encircled, as we were, with blooming faces and meadows. In my secret heart, I all along kept looking down, with success, on Schabacker's refusal; and till midnight made myself a happy day of it: I had deserved it, Berga still more. Nevertheless, about one in the morning, I was destined to find a windmill to tilt with; a windmill, which truly lays about it with somewhat longer, stronger and more numerous arms than a giant, for which Don Quixote might readily enough have taken it. On the market-place, for reasons more easily fancied than specified in words, I let Berga go along some twenty paces before me; and I myself, for these foresaid reasons, retire without malice behind a covered booth, the tent most probably of some rude trader; and linger there a moment according to circumstances: lo! steering hither with dart and spear, comes the Booth-watcher, and coins and stamps me, on the spot, into a filcher and housebreaker of his Booth-street; though the simpleton sees nothing but that I am standing in the corner, and doing anything but--taking. A sense of honour without callosity is never blunted for such attacks. But how in the dead of night was a man of this kind, who had nothing in his head--at the utmost beer, instead of brains--to be enlightened on the truth of the matter?

[Note 67: Individual Minds, nay Political Bodies, are like organic bodies: extract the _interior_ air from them, the atmosphere crushes them together; pump off under the bell the _exterior_ resisting air, the interior inflates and bursts them. Therefore, let every State keep up its internal and its external resistance both at once.]

I shall not conceal my perilous resource: I seized the fox by the tail, as we say; in other words, I made as if I had been muddled, and knew not rightly, in my liquor, what I was about: I therefore mimicked everything I was master of in this department; staggered hither and thither; splayed out my feet like a dancing-master; got into zigzag in spite of all efforts at the straight line; nay, I knocked my good head (perhaps one of the clearest and emptiest of the night), like a full one, against real posts.

However, the Booth-bailiff, who probably had been oftener drunk than I, and knew the symptoms better, or even felt them in himself at this moment, looked upon the whole exhibition as mere craft, and shouted dreadfully: "Stop, rascal; thou art no more drunk than I! I know thee of old. Stand, I say, till I speak to thee! Wouldst have thy long finger in the market, too? Stand, dog, or I'll make thee!"

You see the whole _nodus_ of the matter: I whisked away zigzag among the booths as fast as possible, from the claws of this rude Tosspot; yet he still hobbled after me. But my Teutoberga, who had heard somewhat of it, came running back; clutched the tipsy market-warder by the collar, and said (shrieking, it is true, in village-wise): "Stupid sot, go sleep the drink out of thy head, or I'll teach thee! Dost know, then, whom thou art speaking to? My husband, Army-chaplain Schmelzle under General and Minister von Schabacker at Pimpelstadt, thou blockhead!--Fye! Take shame, fellow!" The watchman mumbled: "Meant no harm," and reeled about his business. "O thou Lioness!" said I, in the transport of love, "why hast thou never been in any deadly peril, that I might show thee the Lion in thy husband?"

[Note 8: In great Saloons, the real stove is masked into a pretty ornamented sham stove; so likewise, it is fit and pretty that a virgin _Love_ should always hide itself in an interesting virgin _Friendship_.]

[Note 12: Nations--unlike rivers, which precipitate their impurities in level places and when at rest--drop their baseness just whilst in the most violent motion; and become the dirtier the farther they flow along through lazy flats.]

Thus lovingly we both reached home; and perhaps in the sequel of this Fair day might still have enjoyed a glorious after-midnight, had not the Devil led my eye to the ninth volume of Lichtenberg's Works, and the 206th page, where this passage occurs: "It is not impossible that at a future period, our Chemists may light on some means of suddenly decomposing the Atmosphere by a sort of Ferment. In this way the world may be destroyed." Ah! true indeed! Since the Earth-ball is lapped up in the larger Atmospheric ball, let but any chemical scoundrel, in the remotest scoundrel-island, say in New Holland, devise some decomposing substance for the Atmosphere, like what a spark of fire would be for a powder-wagon: in a few seconds, the monstrous devouring world-storm catches me and you in Flaetz by the throat; my breathing, and the like, in this choke-air is over, and the whole game ended! The Earth becomes a boundless gallows, where the very cattle are hanged: worm-powder, and bug-liquor, Bradly ant-ploughs, and rat-poison, and wolf-traps are, in this universal world-trap and world-poison, no longer specially needful; and the Devil takes the whole, in the Bartholomew-night, when this cursed "Ferment" is invented.

From the true soul, however, I concealed these deadly Night Thoughts; seeing she would either painfully have sympathised in them, or else mirthfully laughed at them. I merely gave orders that next morning (Saturday) she was to be standing booted and ready, at the outset of the returning coach; if so were she would have me speedily fulfil her wishes in regard to that stock of Rathships which lay so near her heart. She rejoiced in my purpose, gladly surrendering the market for such prospects. I too slept sound, my great toe tied to her finger, the whole night through.

[Note 28: When Nature takes the huge old Earth-round, the Earth-loaf, and kneads it up again, for the purpose of introducing under this pie-crust new stuffing and Dwarfs,--she then, for most part, as a mother when baking will do to her daughters, gives in jest a little fraction of the dough (two or three thousand square leagues of such dough are enough for a child) to some Poetical or Philosophical, or Legislative polisher, that so the little elf may have something to be shaping and manufacturing beside its mother. And when the other young ones get a taste of sisterkin's baking, they all clap hands, and cry: "Aha, Mother! canst; bake, like _Suky_ here?"]

The Dragoon, next morning, twitched me by the ear, and secretly whispered into it that he had a pleasant fairing to give his sister; and so would ride off somewhat early, on the nag he had yesterday purchased of the horse-dealer. I thanked him beforehand.

At the appointed hour, all gaily started from the Staple, I excepted; for I still retained, even in the fairest daylight, that nocturnal Devil's-Ferment and Decomposition (of my cerebral globe as well as of the Earth-globe) fermenting in my head; a proof that the night had not affected me, or exaggerated my fear. The Blind Passenger, whom I liked so ill, also mounted along with us, and looked at me as usual, but without effect; for on this occasion, when the destruction not of myself only, but of worlds, was occupying my thoughts, the Passenger was nothing to me but a joke and a show: as a man, while his leg is being sawed off, does not feel the throbbing of his heart; or amid the humming of cannon, does not guard himself from that of wasps; so to me any Passenger, with all the fire-brands he might throw into my near or distant Future, could appear but ludicrous, at a time when I was reflecting that the "Ferment" might, even in my journey between Flaetz and Neusattel, be, by some American or European man of science, quite guiltlessly experimenting and decomposing, hit upon by accident and let loose. The question, nay prize-question now, however, were this: "In how far, since Lichtenberg's threatening, it may not appear world-murderous and self-murderous, if enlightened Potentates of chemical nations do not enjoin it on their chemical subjects, who in their decompositions and separations may so easily separate the soul from their body, and unite Heaven with Earth,--not in future to make any other chemical experiments than those already made, which hitherto have profited the State rather than harmed it?"

Unfortunately, I continued sunk in this Domsday of the Ferment with all my thoughts and meditations, without, in the whole course of our return from Flaetz to Neusattel, suffering or observing anything, except that I actually arrived there, and at the same time saw the Blind Passenger once more go his ways.

My Bergelchen alone had I constantly looked at by the road, partly that I might still see her, so long as life and eyes endured; partly that, even at the smallest danger to her, be it a great, or even all-over-sweeping Deluge and World's-doom, I might die, if not _for_ her, at least _by_ her, and so united with that stanch true heart, cast away a plagued and plaguing life, in which, at any rate, not half of my wishes for her have been fulfilled.

So then were my Journey over,--crowned with some _Historiolae_; and in time coming, perhaps, still more rewarded through you, ye Friends about Flaetz, if in these pages you shall find any well-ground pruning-knives, whereby you may more readily out-root the weedy tangle of Lies, which for the present excludes me from the gallant Schabacker:--Only this cursed Ferment still sits in my head. Farewell then, so long as there are Atmospheres left us to breathe. I wish I had that Ferment out of my head.

Yours always,

ATTILA SCHMELZLE.

P.S.--My Brother-in-law has kept his promise well, and Berga is dancing. Particulars in my next!

LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,

DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES;

EXTRACTED FROM

FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES BY JEAN PAUL.

LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,

INSTEAD OF PREFACE.

Merchants, Authors, young Ladies and Quakers, call all persons, with whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to printers, pressmen and other such persons. But as I could not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page: on these we are now printing.

My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure, as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.

Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: To soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: Simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and rain-screen. The third, finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of alternating between the other two.

This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.

The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or genius, poetic storm, impels; in short, every mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but that of writing the largest folios), all these men fence themselves in by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse sense does: every _fixed_ idea, such as rules every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying; and on his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long fair dream of his ideal Motherland,--Alas! to few is this dream granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![30]

[30] So are the Vampires called.

This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast and neck fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State, and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors, Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and for refreshment, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons, what way of becoming happy _here_, can I possibly point out?

My _second_ merely; and that is as follows: To take a compound microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors by new ones. The purpose, for which I have sent _Fixleins Life_ into the Messrs. Luebeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same _Life_,--therefore in this Preface it is less needful,--I may show to the whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the nightgown more than the dresscoat; that Plutus' heaps are worth less than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity, a race of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms and of their nightcaps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals; in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the bloodletting-day of these their news-bringers; in the day of slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigour of grim winter; and in all such days. You perceive, my drift is that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon one could preach to our century, were a sermon on the duty of staying at home.

The _third_ skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The foregoing _second_ way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The _first_ is too good for him. He has not always the force, like Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and, like Backhuysen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the drawing-board to paint it on. And then his _pains_ are not less lasting than his _fatigues_. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena: it is but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps, Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for the whole it is better so: the longer portion of life is a field beaten flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.

But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlour theatre, on which his children may enact some good pieces from the _Children's Friend_. Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter, have been enabled to reflect, that when it is done, so also will the Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is seething in butter for the Author of this Work.

As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[31] half-satirical half-philosophical part of the Work, till that opportunity.

Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his half anonymity,[32] and for the first time subscribes himself with his _whole_ true name,

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

_Hof in Voigtland, 29th June 1795._

[31] _Fixlein_ stands in the middle of the volume; preceded by
_Einer Mustheil fuer Madchen_ (A Jelly-course for Young Ladies); and
followed by _Some_ JUS DE TABLETTE _for Men_. A small portion of
the Preface relating to the first I have already omitted. Neither
of the two has the smallest relation to _Fixlein_.--ED.

[32] _J. P. H., Jean Paul_ HASUS, _Jean Paul_, &c. have in
succession been Richter's signatures. At present even, his German
designation, either in writing or speech, is never _Richter_, but
_Jean Paul_.--ED.

LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.

FIRST LETTER-BOX.

_Dog-days Vacation. Visits. An Indigent of Quality_.

Egidius Zebedaeus Fixlein had just for eight days been Quintus,[33] and fairly commenced his teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar. These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this hour, to pat the cranium of that good-man who invented the Dog-days Vacation: I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet, and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.

[33] For understanding many little hints which occur in this _Life
of Fixlein_, it will be necessary to bear in mind the following
particulars: A German _Gymnasium_, in its complete state, appears
to include eight Masters; Rector, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus,
Quartus, Tertius, &c., to the _first_ or lowest. The _forms_, or
classes, again, are arranged in an inverse order; the _Primaner_
(boys of the _Prima_, or first form) being the most advanced, and
taught by the Rector; the _Secundaner_, by the Conrector, &c., and
therefore the _Quartaner_ by the Quintus. In many cases, it would
seem, the number of Teachers is only six; but, in this
Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, we have express evidence that there was
no curtailment.--ED.

The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn. The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.

"Manikin," said he to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me the bundle to the village: run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer and gentleman-in-waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.

He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with coloured beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might not skip away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus farthermore got by heart the few fields, on which the grain was already reaped.

But now roam slower, Fixlein, through his Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band: they cannot know that she has no maid; and that today the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the _Tiers Etat_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.

You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaeus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?

"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedaeus!" said the mother, giving an embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who, had ducked past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room: but I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.

But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go: these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.

In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face: Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence--no schoolboy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglott in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae_, _majusculae_, _minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Root-eaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?

My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them, it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fraeulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is?

She is,--for if (according to Lessing) in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance to my own; but an authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck: on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God,--which, in the thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured: her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.

It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba Anomala_ along with him.

The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.

Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party,--for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted,--now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honour for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maison-bouche_ I do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 livres 21 sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction. Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather from this meal, consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle: but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing, save only clothes, husbands and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette: for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts and the first principles were wanting: he honoured these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honouring. Farther, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.

The fairest piece of news was, that Fraeulein Thiennette had sent word today: "he might visit Her Ladyship tomorrow, as My Lord, his godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's godfather: but he,--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes,--had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefulest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college,--when he and his dog, as ill luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche, Gilles_), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name,--for Gilles means Egidius,--must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal: he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never recalled; his error, his anger and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honour-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.

I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the _Litteratur-zeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A schoolman, that expects to become a professor, will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one, who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage,--as if it had, like a _Casa Santa_, come flying out of Erlangen, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and alighted in Hukelum,--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself, was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.

The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_: people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so: but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.

Courteously and kindly did Zebedaeus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Guk-guk.[34]

[34] A university beer.

Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up, close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their main equipments, like Phoenixes, existed but in the singular number; one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quit-rent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture,--he was just come to the subject of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_,--to descry, through the window of his auditorium, a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.

[35] From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the
whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full
force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his
house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be
made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written
commands of the Pope; the neighbourhood must indemnify him for what
is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance,
the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor
is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten
houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered;
his legacies are not abridged by _falcidia_, &c. &c.

Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road, courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle: houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fraeulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of his benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.

Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction like an order of nobility does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into _Resonance_ together.

It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which tomorrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crum of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein,--the counterpart of great men and geniuses,--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving house-mate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honour in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honour, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[36] he could not figure: the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.

[36] _Literary Germany_; a work (I believe of no great merit) which
Richter often twitches in the same style.--ED.

He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.