Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
EGIDIUS ZEBDÄUS FIXLEIN had just for eight days been Quintus,[36]and fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar. These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days' Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet, and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.
The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn. The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.
"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.
He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields on which the grain was already reaped.
But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to theTiers État, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedäus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?
"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedäus!" said the mother, giving an embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.
But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifedparterre. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer'sCritica Sacra, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom theliteræ inversæ majusculæ minusculæ, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fräulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know whosheis.
She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even knowWerter) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured; her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous, and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned theVerba Anomalaalong with him.
The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.
Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-oneGarçons de la MaisonboucheI do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor aFruiterieof thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction. Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.
The fairest piece of news was, that Fräulein Thiennette had sent word to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain. Old Aufhammer was calledEgidius, and was Fixlein's godfather; but he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally made him no christening present, except that of his name, which proved to be the very balefullest. For, ourEgidiusFixlein, with his Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (Couche Gilles), it must apparently have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to mortal; he knew not head or tail of whatcouchesignified; a word, which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying to theirvalets de chiens. But there were three things which Von Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in studying his Latin Bible" (theVulgata), that is, in reading theLitteraturzeitung, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger, eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like aCasa Santa, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse, and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of Rome.
The landlord and his guest formed an excellentbureau d'esprit; people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
Courteously and kindly did Zebedäus (who could not even enter in his Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[37]
Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up[38]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number: one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several otherones, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishingcoroinvented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he--"fictio sequitur naturam,"--it behooved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with takingRutcher-dues, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject ofForest Salt and Coin Regalities--to descry through the window of his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fräulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of theEcho; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo intoResonancetogether.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising thejus compascuion the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel'sGelehrtes Deutschland,[39]he could not figure; the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.
After supper he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.
Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in the dark too.HimThiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will;herhe edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place! I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise Auguste Timothé Eon de Beaumont,[40]but a smooth, fair-haired, white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected, Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit, had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly, considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in dreaming....
Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping, shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--
Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft.
The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock, soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in company, like me, with high people, with a Fräulein Thiennette, he soon knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di veaver (Savoir vivre) require."
He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose) neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body, cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--"She should soon die; but the godchildren of her husband she would remember in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles) that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the magnet--attracted and held fast.
Supposing even that the Devilhad, in some idle minute, sown a handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."
The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk, Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass); yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--sheshrinks into absolute nothing before a parson.
In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual series of theHamburg Political Journal; perceiving that with these historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the political world--twelve months ago.
On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to thank God, as himself was now doing.
The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides. I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them; one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.
Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother,Clara, the twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys, that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly, if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards, and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less interesting performances--at aCollection of Errors of the Press, in German writings; he comparedErratawith each other; showed which occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.
Moreover, he took his place among the GermanMasorites. He observes with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had theirMasorato show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[41]), or in the whole Bible itself. But where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show? Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."
I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation, they find this number incorrect.[42]
Much also did the Quintuscollect; he had a fineAlmanack Collection, aCatechismandPamphlet Collection; also, aCollection of Advertisements, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on hisAlphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books, where my name also occurs among the Js.
But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned whomeantto write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their twentieth,--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[43]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[44]).
Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, toconcert-clocks, which, though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross, stupid steeple-clocks.
To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention. For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separateletter-boxes. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year, and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.
But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother; this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves. It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather thank God for it!--
After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk, he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regularlittleforms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glasshouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had in former days resembled theSedes Exploratoriaof the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.
Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.----
Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists, not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[45]stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, tothou[46]him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned theIrregular Verbswith Thiennette.
These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little.
He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does there lurk, in the smallesthomunculus, the model of--the Catholic Church.
So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the second time, close a Chapter of thisLife, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep.