CHAPTER IV.A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE—LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR, THE VENNER—SELF-DECEPTIONS—ADAM’S MARRIAGE SERMON—SHADOWING AND OVER-SHADOWING.There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.When the Schulrath was gone, the poor’s advocate took his sulky house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction—every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one’s own heart, or soften another’s.But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of speech, and play herinstrumentalmusic all the louder, because hervocalparts are counting their rests.Lenette Wendelinemoved everything and said everything, as softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed—and he had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one—ay, and to do it with a will—and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there’s one thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a man’s lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of us, ratherlikea violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise in itself—and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because it’s sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortifiedhimselfagainst grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long, Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.He wouldn’t have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife’s speechlessness, that he was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs such important poetical functions in Voltaire’s Henriade), and introducing her into the homely “Volkslied” of an advocate, by way of adea ex machinato unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial document.“May it please your Lordship,“I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial my humble petition,“That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of your visits.“Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a certain quantity of my wife’s hair—the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship’s being minded to exercise ajus compascui, or right of free common and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your Lordship’s own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a souvenir out of your Lordship’s head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine oldPrugel Knecht,[27]i. e. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.“I have the honour to remain, &c.”I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne—those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcæ) of the foolish—to such an extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers;’ the satirical poison bubbles and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink—i. e. his head only, not from his heart.I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolarypereatlong ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought—ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended—would be, “Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all.” Many of the saints in the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—out of her mouth.The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: “I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden—I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!”“Good woman!” said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette’s shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:—“She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell’s army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, andtoogood for me and for many another man.” Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers—the empty hand being in her husband’s possession—and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. He went on, faster, “Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother’s money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me—we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment—now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal fromus!”The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing the air with it, “You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you’ll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all events, Idoexpect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers—in fact, the long and the short of it is,I will nothave him come here any more.”And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people’s, mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;—but a single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,—and a slip in Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of “the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette’s clouds cleared away when she heard that a paper escarpment andcheval de friseagainst the Venner had been constructed at her door. “Then he will trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and deceiving everyone he comes across.”[28]“We don’t employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak grammatically,” said Stiefel; “irregular verbs such as ‘kriechen,trügen,lügen,’ though they areverba anomala, and as such have ‘kroch,log,trog,’ and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German grammarians—although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others—and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, ‘lügt,trügt,kriecht,’ &c., at the present day, that is.”“Don’t find fault with my dear Augspurger’s Lutheran inflections,” said Siebenkæs; “there’s something touching to me about these irregular verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession.” Here she drew her husband’s ear softly down to her lips and said, “What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I’m out of the room, whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible.” He asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as follows:—“We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob’s tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night, and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?”Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a beaming face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept constantly coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table at which the two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication of a more than ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from her, saying “it washisduty.” Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both the apples of his eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own planet, Lenette; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most men, he could far sooner pardon the rival lover than the unfaithful fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that he was a far better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself. For instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch of Lenette’s troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion, and the Venner’s assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in the slightest degree.At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter from Leibgeber.“Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.“My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,Father and Son!“For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my entire genealogical tree:—as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried about with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and his long line of descendants—which is not wholly unreeled and wound up even at this day—till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I wish to goodness I had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you, let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and taken hold of me with such power; let me not write a word in this letter that does not add a touch to the three-quarter-length portrait which I shall draw of myself as the first father of mankind!“Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing I were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the India of the universe, as mypatrimonium Petri,Pauli,Judæand the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man, and consequently the first and last of universal monarchs (although as yet without any subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire earth. It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, though not our first father), to make a similar claim, or rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he constituted himself the guardian and the heir of all the countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set two other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of heaven and a crown of hell.“How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have strolled up and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our marriage night, in our aprons and beasts’ skins, and delivered an address in Hebrew to the mother of all living.“Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of innocence, a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of history, both universal and literary, the various criminal and other codes of law, all the dead languages as well as the living, and was a kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned society, a pocket university, and miniature goldenSiècle de Louis XIV. Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture it is a miracle (and what’s more, a very lucky job) that in my leisure moments I put down the cream of my universal knowledge on paper, because when I subsequently fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these excerpts, orCatalogues raisonnés, of my former wisdom by me, so that I could refer to them.“‘Virgin!’ (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise commenced) ‘it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about is sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall undertake the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of our entering into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet, unfortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding exhortation, direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and first of wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the act of reflecting and considering, and how—“‘In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old world, the other into the new; and“‘In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the kind, but marry.“‘After which a short elench, orusus epanorthoticus, will be adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the night.’IN THE FIRST PLACE“‘My dearly beloved!“‘Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim of—not so much follies asfools, with a good many wise men stuck in here and there between them by way of parentheses. I am of short stature, it is true, and the ocean[29]came a good deal above my ancles, and besprinkled my new beasts’ skin; and yet, as I walk up and down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, containing the seeds of all nations, and carrying the repertory of the whole human race, an entire world in miniature andorbis pictus, round my middle like a pedlar’s stock in trade. ForBonnet, who is in me among the rest, will sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove that they are all one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of parentheses, that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains them both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting one inside the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy bridegroom—this is a point, dear bride, which cannot be madetoointelligible to you—all religious sects, excepting the Preadamites, but including the Adamites,[30]and all giants, the great Christopher himself among them every individual of every nation of all the earth—all the shiploads of negroes destined for America, and the packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised by England to Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, a whole Jews’-quarter—a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the earth—since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I am not induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but look at me well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself: “Now, in this man and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and harmony, the highest and noblest royal families and princely houses (though not yet sorted out from among the common ship’s company), all free imperial orders of knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their vassals, cottiers, and tenants, it is true—monasteries and nunneries next door to each other—barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and canons! What a man! What an Anak!” you will add. You are right, dear, I am indeed—the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the universal court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walkingcorpus jurisof all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven’t I Meusel’s ‘Learned Germany’ and Jöcher’s ‘Scholastic Lexicon’ within me all complete, and Jöcher and Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their supplementary volumes? I wish I could just let you see Cain—who, if head second of this discourse should determine me, would be our first offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent—as I believe him to be—how he contains all the rest, one inside the other, like beer glasses—all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda, and the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write down any of thyscientia mediabefore thy fall, as I did, and consequently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I, however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy to perceive that, where other men beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall beget whole millions of tens, and units into the bargain, seeing that the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians, Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and daughters over and above) have all got to come into existence through me, and that in every million of them there will always be at least five hundred who neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know little of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one; but I know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening mylimbus infantum, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I weep and lament when I merely peep in between the leaves of the centuries in their long course, and see nothing there but gouts of gore, and a congeries of idiots—when I think of the trouble and pain to be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible hand, a hand even as good as a minister’s or an elephant’s trunk—before poor humanity gets through its dame’s school, and private tutors, and French governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools, Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes, dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. Nobody will think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings, as the spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of eggs; not you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne, and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single individual feted and amused.[31]And I shall be taken to task on account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the greatest of all man’s faults is that he has such a number of little ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything buthating his neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions; that he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous—just as the English employ French language teachers, though they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original “red earth,” and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweakhimselfby the nose—unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above authors, authors above critics—Heimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world’s history as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I, like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thySternocleidomastoideum, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the head, and so express your “yes” when I put to you the question, “Wilt thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?”“‘You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must proceed to theSECOND PLACE,and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming theentrepreneursof the human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two—men whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning (as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that’s to say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at length kneel down, and cry, “Good morning, my children! Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature.” And then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him, say, “Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just have showntheeonly, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I’m sure she would have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.’”“And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest ever on the warm, heaving breast of“Thy Friend.“Postscript and Clausula Salutaris.“Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches’ dance upon cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and as such, can’t be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the booksellers’ shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces, that is, other people’s profiles; but most of the heads which sat or stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real truth of the matter; it’s not altogether a matter of indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite ‘all there,’ I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of exercising various civil functions.“In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied (incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o’clock in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the ‘Advertiser,’ a couple of programmes of Professor Lang’s of this place, relative to the General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank’s of Pavia. There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms, and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face, I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I pride myself upon in ladies’ society are my likeness to you and my weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of your old uncle’s with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in the way-bill as bridegroom’s effects.“The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self, I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth, the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming. And so, fare thee somewhat well.”They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the Heimlicher’s niece was being brought up could be none other than the Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart—what was left of it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)—would be the marriage torch to light her to her new home.As there were three heavens in this letter—one for each of the party—kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel, the letter itself for Siebenkæs—I shouldn’t have been astonished if the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with delight—for the glad blood rose to his sober head—opened the papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed “relishes before supper,” and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of his oil with her water—he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have, happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). “It shall be put on the stocks to-night,” said Siebenkæs.When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon Lenette’s finger didn’t squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and gavehimselfcredit for having been the means of filing it smoother and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said—“I shall always be delighted to come whenever there’s the slightest thing the matter with you two charming people.”Lenette answered, “Oh yes, do come very often.”And Siebenkæs added, “The oftener the better.”And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason was that he had Leibgeber’s letter lying by his plate in the place where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty darkness between—their first happy meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave where he was panting and toiling now—and the coming spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through the dark night sky.At length he “came to himself,”i. e. to his wife; the strong image of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride’s profile up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. “Well darling, and how are you getting on?” he said, awaking from his reverie and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their hand into their husbands’, and say “There, I’m good again,” without a very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more ready to do it. Wendelinedidhold hers out, but did it too coldly, and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly—she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares—and at length, when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast there—she pulled, trying to look very serious—he looked at her very fondly and tenderly—she couldn’t help smiling at this and then he took the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart, and said, in her arms, “Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?” And now the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately—But, my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the first was said to signify.The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen to be a painter’s brush—or a painter’s brush to be an engraver’s style—or an engraver’s style a flower anther, generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses.The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette’s shoulder fitted into the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of white paper was tacked on to the board—her pretty, soft head was pressed on the stiff paper—he applied, with much care and self restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality—and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of it; thebackpart of the head was pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.“Wendeline, your head isn’t still a moment,” he said. And indeed her face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicatebasso relievoof her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he couldn’t draw, and which she always had either too much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, “See, haven’t you got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here’s where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning.”“Try once more, dear; I’ll do just as you tell me; I should like it to be very nice,” Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of some white hemisphere—instead of breathing, he found she washoldingher breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to her face.And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against his heart.“Ah!” (he thought) “can it be that she does really love him?” (i. e.the Schulrath).His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning prayers, had ever touched, and thought “Mustthiscome upon me too? mustthisjoy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?” He could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from her shoulder—fell upon her closed lips—kissed away the pent-up sigh—pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers, and said—“I can’t do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don’t be vexed, darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don’t you understand me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?”She answered quite innocently, “Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really havenotthe slightest idea.”Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams—the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day—our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain—for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business—would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn’t exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one her father shouldn’t hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. Ididmanage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.The old man—who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before—had this evening onlypretendedto be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use in a shop than——”“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one single,half-word!”I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,[32]and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading, there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as forcorruptingher—why! that’s just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl toyou?” was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[33]“Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own.”The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own. Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets—namely, the forgetter’sself. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we alwaysmove awayto a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to speak under my nose.Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!”Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes.”The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, tobedeath and the future itself.”In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to theignes fatuiand glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come and alight upon our shores.The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw thecomingsorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that arepast, or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence spreads theirseedfor evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awakeUNDERme, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barelythinkmy own—“Oh! may you all be happyallthe years of your lives.”END OF BOOK I.
A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE—LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR, THE VENNER—SELF-DECEPTIONS—ADAM’S MARRIAGE SERMON—SHADOWING AND OVER-SHADOWING.
There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.
When the Schulrath was gone, the poor’s advocate took his sulky house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay, partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical deduction—every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one’s own heart, or soften another’s.
But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent. Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of Lenette’s open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.
Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that she might not see that he was following her example, and that her sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of another’s. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth, ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue, yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a language-machine and fountain of speech, and play herinstrumentalmusic all the louder, because hervocalparts are counting their rests.Lenette Wendelinemoved everything and said everything, as softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.
When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed—and he had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one—ay, and to do it with a will—and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there’s one thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind, ends by blowing out all a man’s lights, thoughts, and joys, and at length his life itself. Just as we all of us, ratherlikea violent thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise in itself—and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because it’s sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortifiedhimselfagainst grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide against bodily torture.
The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long, Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.
He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.
He wouldn’t have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife’s speechlessness, that he was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs such important poetical functions in Voltaire’s Henriade), and introducing her into the homely “Volkslied” of an advocate, by way of adea ex machinato unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following academic-controversial document.
“May it please your Lordship,
“I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial my humble petition,
“That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of your visits.
“Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a certain quantity of my wife’s hair—the undersigned hereby undertakes to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship’s being minded to exercise ajus compascui, or right of free common and pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking as many of your Lordship’s own hairs as may be requisite to constitute a souvenir out of your Lordship’s head, by the roots, like monthly radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the authorities) with a fine oldPrugel Knecht,[27]i. e. with a private tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.
“I have the honour to remain, &c.”
I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and Sterne—those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three furies (Parcæ) of the foolish—to such an extent that, as their disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition, he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers;’ the satirical poison bubbles and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and ink—i. e. his head only, not from his heart.
I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters (because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry), and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly, even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolarypereatlong ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?
The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind, endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam lights upon it, and its only thought—ay, were it but the day before yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended—would be, “Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all.” Many of the saints in the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.
Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening, like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture, because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there. Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors of this sort, to come in when he’s suffering from an attack of wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron thief-apple of silence—which grows on the same stalk as the apple of discord—out of her mouth.
The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband answered for her: “I was her brother in affliction, and bore the cross-bar of the burden—I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of ashes; there they are still to be seen!”
“Good woman!” said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on Lenette’s shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:—
“She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell’s army, in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our lives. For my Lenette is good, andtoogood for me and for many another man.” Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with his fine fingers—the empty hand being in her husband’s possession—and the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing. He went on, faster, “Yes, she might have been very comfortable and well-off with me, but that my mother’s money is kept back from me in this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy without the money, and she me—we never had a word, never a single unhappy moment—now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till the Venner came. He has taken a good deal fromus!”
The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing the air with it, “You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster! You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that you’ll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr. Siebenkæs, this, at all events, Idoexpect of you, that if ever he comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of pincers—in fact, the long and the short of it is,I will nothave him come here any more.”
And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people’s, mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly. He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;—but a single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,—and a slip in Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of “the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette’s clouds cleared away when she heard that a paper escarpment andcheval de friseagainst the Venner had been constructed at her door. “Then he will trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and deceiving everyone he comes across.”[28]
“We don’t employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak grammatically,” said Stiefel; “irregular verbs such as ‘kriechen,trügen,lügen,’ though they areverba anomala, and as such have ‘kroch,log,trog,’ and so on in the imperfect tense, are still always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German grammarians—although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others—and therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, ‘lügt,trügt,kriecht,’ &c., at the present day, that is.”
“Don’t find fault with my dear Augspurger’s Lutheran inflections,” said Siebenkæs; “there’s something touching to me about these irregular verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg confession.” Here she drew her husband’s ear softly down to her lips and said, “What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I’m out of the room, whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible.” He asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as follows:—“We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted to Jacob’s tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night, and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?”
Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a beaming face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept constantly coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table at which the two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication of a more than ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from her, saying “it washisduty.” Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both the apples of his eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own planet, Lenette; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most men, he could far sooner pardon the rival lover than the unfaithful fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that he was a far better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself. For instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch of Lenette’s troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion, and the Venner’s assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in the slightest degree.
At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter from Leibgeber.
“Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.
“My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,Father and Son!
“For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my entire genealogical tree:—as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried about with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and his long line of descendants—which is not wholly unreeled and wound up even at this day—till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I wish to goodness I had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you, let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and taken hold of me with such power; let me not write a word in this letter that does not add a touch to the three-quarter-length portrait which I shall draw of myself as the first father of mankind!
“Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing I were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the India of the universe, as mypatrimonium Petri,Pauli,Judæand the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man, and consequently the first and last of universal monarchs (although as yet without any subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire earth. It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, though not our first father), to make a similar claim, or rather it did occur to him some centuries ago, when he constituted himself the guardian and the heir of all the countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set two other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of heaven and a crown of hell.
“How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have strolled up and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our marriage night, in our aprons and beasts’ skins, and delivered an address in Hebrew to the mother of all living.
“Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of innocence, a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of history, both universal and literary, the various criminal and other codes of law, all the dead languages as well as the living, and was a kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned society, a pocket university, and miniature goldenSiècle de Louis XIV. Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture it is a miracle (and what’s more, a very lucky job) that in my leisure moments I put down the cream of my universal knowledge on paper, because when I subsequently fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these excerpts, orCatalogues raisonnés, of my former wisdom by me, so that I could refer to them.
“‘Virgin!’ (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise commenced) ‘it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about is sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall undertake the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of our entering into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet, unfortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding exhortation, direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and first of wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the act of reflecting and considering, and how—
“‘In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old world, the other into the new; and
“‘In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the kind, but marry.
“‘After which a short elench, orusus epanorthoticus, will be adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the night.’
IN THE FIRST PLACE
“‘My dearly beloved!
“‘Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim of—not so much follies asfools, with a good many wise men stuck in here and there between them by way of parentheses. I am of short stature, it is true, and the ocean[29]came a good deal above my ancles, and besprinkled my new beasts’ skin; and yet, as I walk up and down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, containing the seeds of all nations, and carrying the repertory of the whole human race, an entire world in miniature andorbis pictus, round my middle like a pedlar’s stock in trade. ForBonnet, who is in me among the rest, will sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove that they are all one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of parentheses, that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains them both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting one inside the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy bridegroom—this is a point, dear bride, which cannot be madetoointelligible to you—all religious sects, excepting the Preadamites, but including the Adamites,[30]and all giants, the great Christopher himself among them every individual of every nation of all the earth—all the shiploads of negroes destined for America, and the packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised by England to Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, a whole Jews’-quarter—a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the earth—since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I am not induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but look at me well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself: “Now, in this man and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the learned faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and harmony, the highest and noblest royal families and princely houses (though not yet sorted out from among the common ship’s company), all free imperial orders of knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their vassals, cottiers, and tenants, it is true—monasteries and nunneries next door to each other—barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and canons! What a man! What an Anak!” you will add. You are right, dear, I am indeed—the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the universal court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walkingcorpus jurisof all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven’t I Meusel’s ‘Learned Germany’ and Jöcher’s ‘Scholastic Lexicon’ within me all complete, and Jöcher and Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their supplementary volumes? I wish I could just let you see Cain—who, if head second of this discourse should determine me, would be our first offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent—as I believe him to be—how he contains all the rest, one inside the other, like beer glasses—all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda, and the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write down any of thyscientia mediabefore thy fall, as I did, and consequently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I, however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy to perceive that, where other men beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall beget whole millions of tens, and units into the bargain, seeing that the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians, Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and daughters over and above) have all got to come into existence through me, and that in every million of them there will always be at least five hundred who neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know little of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one; but I know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening mylimbus infantum, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I weep and lament when I merely peep in between the leaves of the centuries in their long course, and see nothing there but gouts of gore, and a congeries of idiots—when I think of the trouble and pain to be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible hand, a hand even as good as a minister’s or an elephant’s trunk—before poor humanity gets through its dame’s school, and private tutors, and French governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools, Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes, dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. Nobody will think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings, as the spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of eggs; not you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne, and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single individual feted and amused.[31]And I shall be taken to task on account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these, I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the greatest of all man’s faults is that he has such a number of little ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything buthating his neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions; that he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the virtuous—just as the English employ French language teachers, though they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original “red earth,” and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweakhimselfby the nose—unless perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above authors, authors above critics—Heimlicher von Blaise will give his hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world’s history as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I, like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thySternocleidomastoideum, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the head, and so express your “yes” when I put to you the question, “Wilt thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?”
“‘You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must proceed to the
and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming theentrepreneursof the human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet, and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two—men whose whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning (as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates, Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that’s to say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather, ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve, thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at length kneel down, and cry, “Good morning, my children! Such of you as are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples, and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature.” And then I shall arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him, say, “Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just have showntheeonly, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I’m sure she would have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.’”
“And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest ever on the warm, heaving breast of
“Thy Friend.
“Postscript and Clausula Salutaris.
“Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches’ dance upon cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and as such, can’t be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the booksellers’ shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces, that is, other people’s profiles; but most of the heads which sat or stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell me the real truth of the matter; it’s not altogether a matter of indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite ‘all there,’ I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of exercising various civil functions.
“In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied (incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o’clock in the morning, and lived to die in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the ‘Advertiser,’ a couple of programmes of Professor Lang’s of this place, relative to the General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank’s of Pavia. There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms, and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face, I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I pride myself upon in ladies’ society are my likeness to you and my weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece of your old uncle’s with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you, entered in the way-bill as bridegroom’s effects.
“The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self, I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth, the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming. And so, fare thee somewhat well.”
They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the Heimlicher’s niece was being brought up could be none other than the Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart—what was left of it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)—would be the marriage torch to light her to her new home.
As there were three heavens in this letter—one for each of the party—kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel, the letter itself for Siebenkæs—I shouldn’t have been astonished if the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated with delight—for the glad blood rose to his sober head—opened the papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed “relishes before supper,” and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of his oil with her water—he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have, happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). “It shall be put on the stocks to-night,” said Siebenkæs.
When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon Lenette’s finger didn’t squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and gavehimselfcredit for having been the means of filing it smoother and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said—
“I shall always be delighted to come whenever there’s the slightest thing the matter with you two charming people.”
Lenette answered, “Oh yes, do come very often.”
And Siebenkæs added, “The oftener the better.”
And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason was that he had Leibgeber’s letter lying by his plate in the place where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty darkness between—their first happy meeting to come floated magically before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic cave where he was panting and toiling now—and the coming spring stood like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the distance, beaming through the dark night sky.
At length he “came to himself,”i. e. to his wife; the strong image of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride’s profile up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. “Well darling, and how are you getting on?” he said, awaking from his reverie and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events, of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their hand into their husbands’, and say “There, I’m good again,” without a very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more ready to do it. Wendelinedidhold hers out, but did it too coldly, and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth, which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this smilingly—she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares—and at length, when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast there—she pulled, trying to look very serious—he looked at her very fondly and tenderly—she couldn’t help smiling at this and then he took the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart, and said, in her arms, “Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?” And now the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately—But, my dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the first was said to signify.
The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen to be a painter’s brush—or a painter’s brush to be an engraver’s style—or an engraver’s style a flower anther, generating generation upon generation of lilies and roses.
The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette’s shoulder fitted into the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of white paper was tacked on to the board—her pretty, soft head was pressed on the stiff paper—he applied, with much care and self restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality—and went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies. But little or nothing came of it; thebackpart of the head was pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.
“Wendeline, your head isn’t still a moment,” he said. And indeed her face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicatebasso relievoof her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he couldn’t draw, and which she always had either too much open or too tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, “See, haven’t you got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here’s where you moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning.”
“Try once more, dear; I’ll do just as you tell me; I should like it to be very nice,” Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of some white hemisphere—instead of breathing, he found she washoldingher breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to her face.
And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against his heart.
“Ah!” (he thought) “can it be that she does really love him?” (i. e.the Schulrath).
His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning prayers, had ever touched, and thought “Mustthiscome upon me too? mustthisjoy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?” He could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from her shoulder—fell upon her closed lips—kissed away the pent-up sigh—pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers, and said—
“I can’t do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don’t be vexed, darling! Tell me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don’t you understand me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?”
She answered quite innocently, “Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really havenotthe slightest idea.”
Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams—the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day—our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.
The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.
The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain—for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business—would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn’t exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (i. e. one her father shouldn’t hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. Ididmanage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.
The old man—who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before—had this evening onlypretendedto be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.
The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation—“Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter’s head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she’ll be of no more use in a shop than——”
“Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!” said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; “just listen to one single,half-word!”
I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, “Herr Pigtail—for in Charles the Great’s time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now—Herr Pigtail, I’m not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year’s going out and the new year’s coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the son of the ——,[32]and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for God’s sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads—one of whom will be her husband—and every tradesman’s wife. Yet for all this reading, there’s still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as forcorruptingher—why! that’s just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain.”
“If you would but just mind your own affairs! What’s the girl toyou?” was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year’s, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter’s but about a groschen’s worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.
It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn’t done it. I had said to myself, “Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale’s, and don’t touch the picture or throttle the bird. What! must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?”
Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince. That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[33]“Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs’s troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own.”
The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it—every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers’ children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own. Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.
I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).
“Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future—bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night.”
It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more—particularly in an appropriate mouth—than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds—for you see it was only eleven o’clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn’t want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.
Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality—the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets—namely, the forgetter’sself. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other entities—deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we alwaysmove awayto a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind’s eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before—me so to speak under my nose.
Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?
But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage—a separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time—stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence—new years’ days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says—“How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!”
Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one’s Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.
I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow—the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.
And now 12 o’clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, “Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes.”
The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.
I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.
I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. “Shallow, timid soul,” thought I, “why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night—thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet—why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon’s ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, tobedeath and the future itself.”
In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier—ay, and ourselves as well—our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to theignes fatuiand glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year’s night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many gods in us—and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.
But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks’ anthems, come and alight upon our shores.
The distant new year’s music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw thecomingsorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that arepast, or like the music around me—just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.
But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family—and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts—as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now—but the great Beneficence spreads theirseedfor evermore)—when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning—and when I thought of those awakeUNDERme, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,—my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.
And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year’s wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barelythinkmy own—
“Oh! may you all be happyallthe years of your lives.”