Chapter XVI: Part 16

After supper, he was just about visiting the Fraeulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipt in the red twilight, in the Castle-garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c. &c.,--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.

Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat: for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man: they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better,--also by reason of our sublime air,--if they can catch us in the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will: _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red may-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.

To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed: in the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary-tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[37] but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.

[37] See _Schmelzle's Journey_, p. 284.--ED.

In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....

Sleep, for today thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look forth into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--

SECOND LETTER-BOX.

_Frau von Aufhammer. Childhood-Resonance. Authorcraft._

The early piping which the little thrush last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fraeulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."

He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck.--If women are flowers,--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones,--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave: nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion: the lower classes she assisted, cherished and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.

She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance: "She should soon die; but the god-children of her husband she would remember in her will." Farther, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Buergermeister and Council had the right of nomination), she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Buergermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."

And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this, true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Shadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love: and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as readily as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us,--as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is, by the magnet,--attracted and held fast.

Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus' soul, yet they had not sprouted; and today especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who,--what he reckoned a Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity but from piety,--was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied: That he now straight-way came forth with his petition to the noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."

The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass); yet he could not but fall-in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon.--But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.

In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving, that with these historical documents of the time, they were scandalously papering the buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world--twelve months ago.

On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honour, but silently to thank God, as himself was now doing.

* * * * *

The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides. I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them: one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.

Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fireproof joys, that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question, had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had laboured,--I shall omit his less interesting performances,--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in German writings: he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.

Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[38]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show? Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."

[38] As in the State.--V. or Von, _de_, _of_, being the symbol of
the nobility, the middle order of the State.--ED.

I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know, if on a more accurate summation they find this number incorrect.[39]

[39] In Erlang, my petition has been granted. The _Bible
Institution_ of that town have found instead of the 116,301 A's,
which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the
Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first
Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which
(uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in
the Koran put together. See _Luedeke's Beschr. des Tuerk. Reichs_
(Luedeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).

Much also did the Quintus _collect_: he had a fine _Almanac Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also a _Collection of Advertisements_, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his _Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name also occurs among the J's.

But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned who _meant_ to write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Luebeck Superintendent Goetze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few: for example, of the Learned, who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their twentieth--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[40]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[41]).

[40] _Paravicini Singularia de viris claris. Cent. I. 2._

[41] _Ejusd. Cent. II._ Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about
the quantity of a syllable: the prize or bet was the beard of the
vanquished. Timotheus lost his.

Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labours: but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad; it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, to _concert-clocks_, which, though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross stupid _steeple-clocks_.

To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling-trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit: for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past, he committed to certain little leaves, which merit our undivided attention. For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate _letter-boxes_. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c. of his twenty-first year, and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.

And here must I in reference to those reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.

But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother: this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment, dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves. It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather thank God for it!--

* * * * *

After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigour for his desk, he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regular _little_ forms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glass-house of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently: he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of colouring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies: balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes, with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows or feeding out of the sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug, citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had, in former days, resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him, as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.

Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it, but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.----

Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar--petitions for church-livings. He took the Address-calendar, and for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen that for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[42] stands in the place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.

[42] Their prayer-barrel, Kueruedu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash,
full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to
side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in
prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same
whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the
calabash.

Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant, who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to _thou_[43] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this: some three-and-forty years ago, a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and--what was not to be replaced--the church-records. (For this reason, it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been thrashing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the Schoolboys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men, about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humour. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle: it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with Thiennette.

[43] In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of
address is by the _third_ person: plural, it indicates respect;
singular, command: the _second_ person is also used; plural, it
generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and
sometimes its product, contempt. _Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend_, is
the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wild _Burschen_
(Students) many a duel (happily, however, often ending like the
_Polemo-Midinia_ in _one_ drop of blood) has been fought, in
consequence of saying _Du_ (thou) and _Sie_ (they) in the wrong
place.--ED.

These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was coloured as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life), an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little.

He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlid, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without farther exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic Church.

So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedaeus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep.

THIRD LETTER-BOX.

_Christmas Recollections. New Occurrence._

For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum: this has only one single _tone_, but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on in the usual monotonous fashion--all the time from the Holidays--till Christmas-eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.

But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the _Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks: while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones.

Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favour of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact, that he, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of waste-paper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons: indeed I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Muse _a belles fesses_), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them: on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas-eve.

At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and bakers were at fisty-cuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes), and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost, with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir-wood into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I hold the _first printing_ in the history of a literary man to be more important than the _first printing_ in the history of Letters: Fixlein could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing, in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake of printing than of use, he farther inserted three or four pedagogic glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster colleagues as a body.

He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts together; and then laid aside the _Opus_, and would no longer look at it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a sigh: he too was in print, as well as I am.

The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands, hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening, to recreate himself; and across the magic vapour of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke, the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows, and illuminated trees in the neighbourhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas-eve from the very dawn, as I had it of old."

At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf, with which the Christ-child[44] has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden calves, and golden Pythagoras'-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes: for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and, in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and day-light come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his _Flora Petrinsularis_;[45] but let him also allow our Quintus his _Window-flora_.--There was no such thing as school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Butcher (his brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother, at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings, nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbours have to call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk, our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table: then as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his brother: "Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.

[44] These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with
equal _gusto_ in another work (_Briefe und Zukuenftige Lebenslemf_);
where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones, to have
been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough
fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit,
of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly
produces, &c. &c. are specified with the same fidelity as
here.--ED.

[45] Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the
Bienne Lake.

About eight o'clock,--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his letter-drawer,--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing, and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night!--What tumult of dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air, church-music of the morning worship.

Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings which then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the chambers of our hearts; and which yet, in the moonlight of memory, with its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it, that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes: but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!

At last came rapid lights from the neighbourhood playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit-perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-coloured grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.----

--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship, and a table-clock.

FOURTH LETTER-BOX.

_Office-brokage. Discovery of the promised Secret. Hans van Fuechslein._

For while the Quintus, in his vapoury chamber, was thus running over the sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer, entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sickbed-exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, _first_, of a table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hours struck, and drumming along with every stroke; _secondly_, of the Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.

As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here, than in the _Reichsanzeiger_, or _Imperial Indicator_.--I have already mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade in Hamburg candles; and the then Buergermeister in coffee-beans, which he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of Flachsenfingen: the other members of the Council acting only as bale-wrappers, shopmen and accountants in the Council wareroom. A Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of office-trading from that principle of the Roman law: _Cui jus est donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est_, that is to say, He who has the right of giving anything away, has also a right to dispose of it for money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of course.

_Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general._

My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[46] of the State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the commonweal must suffer in the long-run, if important posts are distributed, not according to the current cash, which is laid down for them, but according to connexions, relationships, party recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction, to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should not one rather expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the _alterum tantum_ than the mere titulary Hofrath?--Money, among European nations, is now the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and consequently in understanding; the rather as a _head_ is stamped on it: to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more nor less than to stand an _examen rigorosum_, which is held by a good _schema examinandi_. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates and _monnoie de confiance_, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in _Gulliver's Travels_, who, for social converse, instead of names of things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed, plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.

[46] Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in
Vienna: in their very names these Vienna people show taste.

From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that often when I used to read that the King of France was devising new offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could not we at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonising with the offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not, for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever: the scholastic Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating;" the King wrote himself "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c. might be conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe, few Advocates would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If, however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this reflex morality, Government should not constrain him.

It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes; according to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names exert an influence on men, appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous animals, _the foam so often hardens into shell_: but such internal morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the fine arts, it is not this, but the _representation_ of it, which forms her true aim.

I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit, Sincerity and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral Address Department, with some half dozen secretaries, who, for a small salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue, and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted--their subdivision I mean;--our country Judges might then be selected for this purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins. This is a precious moral _Rolfinkenism_, which our Jurists have learned from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin into a venial!--

School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic certainly; yet still they are monarchies,--school-monarchies, to wit,--resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say, arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring the young of the community a Hameln _Rat_-and-Child-_catcher_; or a Weisse's _Child's-friend_,--this to the Council can make no difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State, except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our Commission of Inspectors when they go examining schools, that they do not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see what is in him.

_End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general._

Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a quite mad notion: they believed, the Quintus would very soon die.

--And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look: now, however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open, nay hang a reverberating-lamp over it.

In medical history, it is a well-known fact that in certain families the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire, I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second year, took to bed and died: every one of my readers would do well to insert in his copy of the _Thirty-Years War_, Schiller having entirely omitted it, the fact, that in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is rather to be questioned."

But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing: the only thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account. He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died: First, because three Gipsies, in three different places and at three different times, had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror. Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties. Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet, and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty: "however," said he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in _His_ keeping? And were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life of my brother should be added to mine?"--Thus, under the cold snow of the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of it a fair snow-man.

The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion; and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves, that he would soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein; but he wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow weather another year, 'tis more than I expect," said Hans.

This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a Hanoverian Postboy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus, whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone bore a grudge; simply because _Fixlein_ did not write himself _Fuechslein_, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage; and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train: "He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind him of it." The mild compliant Quintus never noticed this large wasp-poisonbag in the Subrector, but took it for a honeybag; nay, by his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The Quintus, in his simplicity, took Fuechslein's contempt for envy of his pedagogic talents.

A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof and Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with (if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas-eve he walks about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for nothing but--daylight: joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like sparrows, his sleep-grains; and tonight, moreover, the registrator of his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which, accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.