That sympathy which grafts, by approach, grown up people in the first quarter of an hour, often draws children also to each other. Our couple flew into each other's arms and hugged each other over forty times a day. You good children! Be glad that you can venture to express your love still more strongly than by letters. For culture restricts the bodily domain of love's expression within narrower and narrower limits--this haggard Duenna took away from us first the whole body of the one we love--then the hand, which we are no longer allowed to press--then the buttons and the shoulders, which we are no more permitted to touch--and of a whole woman she has given us nothing to kiss, except (as a kind of hair) the glove--we all now manipulate each other at a distance. Amandus with his more feminine heart hung upon Gustavus's more manly one with all the love which the weaker gives the stronger, more richly than it wins back from it love in return. Hence woman loves man more purely; she loves in him the present object of her heart, he in her, oftentimes, the image of his fancy; hence comes his fickleness and vacillation. This little preface must be taken only as an introduction to a little passage of arms between our little Castor and Pollux.
Namely: they could not bear to be so long apart, as it took to unbind and bind up the eyes. As often as the bandage came off, Gustavus stood before him and absolutely demanded that he should see him, and put his finger up to his own nose and said: "Where do I touch now?" But he examined the blind boy without seeing. After a week's absence Amandus ran up to him, saying: "Shove up my bandage, I can certainly see thee too as well as my cat Harry!" When Gustavus had lifted[25]it up, and when it proved that he actually passed into the eye of his cured friend, just as he was, coat, shoes and stockings, then was he gladder than a patriot whose Prince opens his eyes or his bandage and sees him. He inventoried his picture-cabinet before his eyes with a perpetual "look!" at every piece. But yet further! The world will know little of it--except those minute particles thereof, the children, of whom it is that I am just going to speak--that these latter played blindman's buff at Hoppedizel's. A disagreeable game!--when there are girls in the case, as there were here, especially such naughty ones as the Professor's were. Amandus introduced himself into the game, and ran round the room, behind the handkerchief, which female cunning had folded over his eyes, catching nothing but disembodied clothes. Unfortunately, crawling, contrary to all proper rules of the game, under the stove, they came against the milk-pan of the dog Spitz. As, now, they had read at that time too few moral philosophers, although they had seen enough of them, accordingly, for want of purepractical reason, they softly pushed the pan so far forward that the groping catch-poll easily trampled upon and tipped it over. Gustavus, as a child, could not help laughing a little. The little sinners threw the blame on him and cried: "O you! if now Amandus had received an injury?" The latter extricated himself from the wet fragments and slightly thumped Gustavus, who was holding him by the hands to comfort him behind on the shoulder-blade, just where according to the Compends the chyle (or milk-juice) joins the blood. "I didn't set it there, indeed I didn't," said he. "Yes, yes! and didn't tell me of it," replied the blindman and gave him another push, only moreviolentlyand yet lessangrily. "Strike away, I did not do anything to thee," and my good hero's voice broke--the other struck at him again and said: "I will never be friends with you any more," but said it as if he was just on the point of weeping. "Ah, thou hast surely run a splinter into thy hand?" asked Gustavus with the most sympathetic voice--in the midst of attempting a fresh punch the thin crust of ice melted down from the warmed heart of Amandus, he embraced the innocent one, and said with glistening tears: "No, indeed! thou hast not done anything, and I will give thee all my playthings; I pray thee, beat me right hard," and so saying he beat himself. It is only the feeling of love that struggles with such bitter-sweet singularities. Amandus often confessed that whenever he had done injustice to any one, in the midst of his grief about it, the propensity always seized him to keep on offending, in order to continue grieving himself so far that at last for very anguish he must needs throw himself with the most ardent love upon the heart of the injured one. But, oh dear Amandus, if a pedagogue in the form of a moral code had happened to open the door!
It must never be supposed that I would vent here personal resentment upon tutors in a body, for, in the first place, I never had any tutor at all, and, secondly, I have been one myself, and a proper one.
I have betaken myself to a new section because I have therein to present to the reader a new person--the Tutor of my hero.
I need not remind a soul, that the Captain looked for so foolish a thing--a thing now too pliable, now too bashful--such a moralizing, spiritless thing as a tutor, in Scheerau, in order that his child might get a regent at the same time with the country. Now, he had there a godfather, who practiced law, music, small talk and the lorgnette and the world's manners; but he had not the courage to propose to that party the office of instruction in a seminary of which the number of pupils amounted to one male. I will just say it out at once, that I myself am this godfather and this new personage; but it will stand my modesty in better stead, if, in a section where I must needs bring forward so much in my own praise, I transpose myself out of the first person into the third, and say merely godfather, not I.
This godfather blew in the Unter-Scheerau Concert, in order, with his flute, to accompany the heavenly voice of a very young Fraülein von Röper, whose throat could often hardly be distinguished from the flute. The whole soul of this damsel is a nightingale's tone under an overhanging curtain of blossoms; her body is a falling, heavenly-pure snowflake, which lasts only in the ether and melts away on the filthy ground. The flutist's eyes and heart were arrested, during the pauses, by a beautiful child, who was lost in a dreamy, phantasying gaze of rapturous attention: it was Gustavus. His first look, after the accompaniment, was toward the neighborhood of the child, in order to find his owner--the first step the godfather took was to the other godparent, the Captain, whose friendly relations with me are well enough known. The male sex is more fortunate and less envious than the female, because the former is able to appreciate with the whole soul two kinds of beauty, male and female; whereas women, for the most part, love only that of the other sex. I, however, have, perhaps, too much enthusiasm for that exalted thing, manly beauty, as well as for poetic enthusiasm, notwithstanding that, of the latter at least, I myself have nothing. From Gustavus the double enchantment acted upon me; I forgot all the enchantresses of the concert in the enchanter; but in the end I was sad, because I could win fewer words than glances from the lovely boy. To the concert, moreover, I, like the rest of the hearers, paid attention only so long as I myself was a fellow-laborer, or as long as one of my female pupils played; for the Scheerau concerts are merely town-talk and prosaic melodramas set to music, wherein the gossip of the hearers in their seats runs along as printed text under the composition. For the rest we subscribe to our concerts more for our children's sake than our own; the musical school-youth get there a dancing floor and riding-school for their fingers and one at least of my catechumens weekly thrums and thrashes the harpsichord. I encourage the parents to this, and say that in such a concert-hall the little ones learn time, because of that there is not only enough there, but more than enough, inasmuch as every musical functionary there pipes, beats, strikes, stamps his own original time, which, in the first place, no one of his neighbors pipes, beats, strikes or stamps after him, and which he himself, secondly, improves from minute to minute. And even if this were not so, I tell them, still there is true musical expression there, and enough to spare; every one expresses there his own emotions, whether of embarrassment or of complete confusion, on his particular instrument; and Bach's rule, to render dissonances forcibly and consonances faintly, every one understands in a hall where the consonances melt in so softly that one can hardly catch a single one of them, and fancies he hears only the discords.
The next morning I flew, half-dressed, to the Captain and--as I could not secure the dear little fellow at any lower price--I brought him right up to the first object of his journey, namely, to take a tutor home with him. It must not be thought that I got myself made an instructor in order to be a biographer,i. e., in order craftily to educateintomy Gustavus all that I afterward wanted to write out of him into a book; for, in the first place, I, surely, as a romance-manufacturer, needed merely to imagine myself such, and impose the fiction upon others; but, secondly, at that time a biography had not been thought of.
It is of far less concern to me to see that my Scheerau relations are understood, than to the world, for I know them already, but the world does not. I formed there a Trinity of three persons. I was music master, legal adviser, and man of the world. Three whimsical parts! I studied in a city which once furnished the greatestjuristsand now furnishes the smallestdogs, two quite opposite articles, as Paris was once the University of all Europeantheologuesand is now ofphilosophers. I have been in Paris also. There, too, I might have become a clever Parliamentary advocate but I would not, and brought nothing away from there with me (as well as from Bologna and some German Imperial cities) but the black legal cloak, which has its reason; for as our clients feed and fee us, and retain more justice and poverty than money, accordingly we patrons mourn for them in black. With the Romans, on the contrary, the clients, who got more than they gave, put on for the advocate, when he came off poorly, a mourning suit.
Secondly, I was music master, but perhaps not a very steady one; for I fell in love with all my female pupils the first quarter (male pupils I declined), and let my feelings shape themselves after my lessons. I cherished a true tenderness, first, towards a lady of rank, whom I will never compromise; secondly, towards her sister, an Abbess, because she learned thorough bass of me; thirdly, towards...; fourthly, towards the wife of the Court Chaplain, who, it is true, is hectic but æsthetic, and who loved too much rather than too littleembellishment uponthe piano (in the local sense of the proposition), and polished, covered and set out the instrument to the finest effect; fifthly, with the lady of the Minister-resident, von Bouse, who has not the least idea of the fact, and at whose hips and charms I was actually stupid with admiration, till I fortunately detected her indiscriminate coquetry and her infidelity to her incognito lover; sixthly, with the whole Court of Scheerau, where, according to the right of thedead hand, I looked upon the reception of a live hand, which offered itself for a pupil of mine, as an investment of the whole heart and goods; seventhly, even with a veritable child, Beata (the above mentioned daughter of Röper), for whom I, once a week in bad weather, and for an equally poor salary, ran out into the country, and with whom one could absolutely think of nothing else but love. In short, there is nothing, leaf-buds, blossom-buds, blossoms, fruits, with which a man does not get entangled who is a teacher of the piano.
Now comes the Man of the World. I cannot, to be sure, show myself personally to my readers (of whom I should be glad to have the population and exact tabulated statement); but the people of Scheerau, before whom this leaf comes, are hereby challenged to speak out their thoughts and decide whether a man who gives the great world three piano lessons daily is any more its teacher than its scholar. Dignity, grace of gait, taste in dress, attitudes, perpendicular, horizontal and diagonal, are not, to be sure, the required merits of an author (though they are of the fine gentleman), and cannot be printed; but this much only I contend for, that it is only at a court one learns all this, especially when he has some influence and takes part as a player, whether at the Hombre table or at the piano table,[26]which, like many a breast at the court, under the dumb wooden surface, conceals a sweet stringed instrument. Of course, when one walks up and down in his study again, among great books and great men, accompanied by the whole republican past, uplifted to the profound perspective of the infinite world beyond the grave, then even the possessor of them despises his shells of empty distinctions. He asks himself: Is there nothing better than to be master over his body (instead of over his passions) and to carry it as lightly as after the first three glasses of champagne--to tone down his style to the universal style, because at courts and at pianos no key must sound out above another--to glide along on the thinjoggling boardof female fancies with such a flying touch that our steps merely accompany the swaying--to dance and walk elegantly, so far as is practicable with one long leg (for, of course, if a piano teacher has to contend with a short leg, the Old Boy may stand on both if he can, as gracefully as the Prince of Artois)--in short, to sublimate all sense into nonsense, all truths into concerts, all honest feelings into pantomimic parodies? Nothing better is there? Ask the perambulator of the study. Thereissomething far better--to be a tutor in Auenthal to such a child of heaven as Gustavus is, and put the whole vagary in print.
The Crown-Prince, for whose payment of his debts the Captain waited, was still on the high-road in foreign parts, whence he drove up on to the throne as up into a tower. Three miserable knaves made their entry still earlier than he. The thing can be narrated: Since the death of His Highness of most blessed memory--the Pope is the highest and most blessedest--one church after another in Scheerau had been, not plundered, but dismantled; the church thieves merely stripped off again the public mourning-cloth, which was on our pulpits and altars. The sextons and choristers found every morning the holy places scalped and the parsons had to stand there in the morning service. Now that money-grasping condor, the commercial agent Röper, had lately caused altar and pulpit in the Maussenbach Church to be rigged out in a frock of black cloth--figured was not holy and cheap enough for him. This sable wrappage was left on them as public mourning--old Röper had consequently very little sleep any longer, because he feared the church-vultures would rob the Maussenbach altar of its festal robing and carry off at the same time the certificate stitched to the cloth which set forth in silken and silver letters who had presented it all. His lawyer, Kolb, therefore, to whom thief-catching is sable-hunting and pearl-fishery, invested the church with all kinds of falcon-eyes; but all would have amounted to nothing had not Falkenberg's servant Robisch on Sunday evening, so soon as the church was closed, said to the schoolmaster, "he should leave it just as it was, he had counted the congregation, and three had not come out with the rest." In short they blockaded the temple till night and fortunately hauled out three secreted cloth-corsairs from the sacred place. The next morning there was a general astonishment; the three church-goers rode in through the gate of Scheerau on a hangman's cart, having on, all of them, black coats and trowsers--at night they had disappeared. For the court (if it had not yet gone to sleep) it was a hateful prospect, that a band of robbers should have put on court-mourning as well as itself, and have stolen for that purpose the mourning wardrobe out of the churches.
"You ought to be hanged," said the Captain to his fellow, "to bring poor thieves to grief, who take nothing from any man, but only from churches." "But surely for such knaves," said I, "it is not fitting to put on court-mourning, if only on account of the expense. In fact why is it that one may not mourn for his personal father[27]though he may for the father of his country? Or why does the Privy Chamber even allow weeping to the children of the land, when, surely, that exhausts the lachrymal glands of the State, and when tears, too, are exempt from taxation?"
"You go too far," said the Captain, "the present administration must keep on in the course it has thus far pursued, if it is to distinguish itself from all its predecessors by the solicitude with which it watches over our grounds, our pennies and our purses."
"The negro-dealers," said the Doctor, but irrelevantly enough, "are still more watchful; for a slave-trader is more troubled by the unfitness of such or such an article--of men or slaves, than of his own wife. Even flexibility of limb and grace in dancing his human live-stock must possess and he cudgels them into it."
"Agriculture," he continued, "trade, manufactures, even national wealth and welfare, in short thebodiesof his subjects, the worst despot can rear and nourish--but for theirsoulshe can do nothing, without acting at every step against his own."
It has often occurred to me, whether mourning-regulations or delegations have not for their object that the sly and sad citizen may avail himself of the liberty of public mourning in order to throw in his domestic mourning into the common mass? Might he not lay up his individual sorrow over the mortality of his aunts, his cousins, till a general application occurred, and so, when the country had wound the condolatory crape round arm and sword, do up all the mourning in a lump and grieve under the same crape for a mother of the country and a step-mother? For courts 'twere easy. Nay, could not these, in fact, in the public mourning mourn for their relations in advance? Might not one, after all, let the whole nonsense drop?...
At last my new sovereign rode in his traveling carriage up on to the throne, and exchanged the coach-canopy for the throne-canopy. The Captain, before the coronation, held a petition in readiness, wherein with the defiance of a saddler, he demanded his money; after the coronation the Prince, like a diamond, had absorbed so much fiery splendor from his crown and his sceptre, that his creditor got his lawyer to draw up a new memorial in which he insisted merely on the interest. As he got nothing, not so much as a resolution, he determined to demand more. For he did not consider that our reigning providers in Scheerau seldom have any money. When we receive or send extraordinary embassies, when we have occasion for baptism or burial, not to mention wars, in such cases we have little or nothing but--extra-taxes, those metallic props and clamps of the rotten throne. In the exchequer-chest, as in heraldry, we denote silver by vacant space.
But both debtor and creditor soon found relief. The latter, the Captain, was marching, as cicerone, with his Gustavus through the cadet quarters and showing him everything for the sake of praising everything, because he was one day to put his head into a gorget--when the young Prince came in also and inspected all the apartments, not in order to forget all on the next saddle, but in order to observe nothing at all. I was sorry--for I had come in at the same time--that every professor relied upon it the Regent would number, if not every hair on his head, yet every lock in his peruke; for he did not so much as notice me and my dignity; very naturally, however, since such a dignity had already become an old story with him, as seen in the finest salons of all lands. He wore--for how long had he been back from his travels?--the princely hat with the nonchalance of a lady's hat; no long administration had yet pressed in the crown to make a dark line around his brow, and theerectpersons around him had not yet been refracted by the media and moisture and membranes of his eye intocrookedprison-laborers. His words he handed round with the munificence of a man of the world, as he would so much snuff; at last Falkenberg also got a pinch. I see my two principals still standing vis-a-vis--my noble and lending principal with the firm but respectful decorum of a soldier, compressed into embonpoint and swelling muscles, and with the confiding kindliness which good-natured persons cherish towards every one who is at the moment talking with them--the crowned and insolvent principal, however, with the picturesque dignity, in which every limb bends inward respectfully to the others, and in which the very attitude is a prolonged flattery, with a drapery of many folds in his pain-racked face, with a complaisance which neither refuses nor consents. My god-father regarded the stereotype complacency of the crowned head as exclusively directed to him; he thought the latter put his questions for the sake of getting an answer; and particularly when my most gracious prince and sovereign had actually expressed himself to the effect that "the little Gustavus was in his placehere," that "he excited a stronger interest by hisair de réveur, than one could explain to himself," and that "so soon as he should be old enough for this institution, one would buy him off from his father for 13,000 Rix dollars cash down:" then was the Captain thrown out of his wits, or rather out of his petition; his petitionary paper was turned into a thanksgiving address; his wish was, that I had already been tutor in his home for eight years; his hope was, the money would follow; and the real advantage was, that his son would get into the best German military academy.
It will be doing me no favor if any one ridicules him. To be sure he swore at his castle: "He wouldn't trust courtiers a hand's breath, and the wholenationwas an offence to his nostrils;" on the other hand, he trusted such court-people as he had, at the moment, to do with him, somewhat more, only--militaryignorantia legummust bear much of the blame in his case; how is he, as a soldier, to know that a prince is not bound to pay any debt?--Perhaps it is not even known to all readers so well as they may assume to themselves. For three reasons a regent need not pay a farthing which he has borrowed of his subjects (if his royal father was the borrower, it is understood, of course). First: an ambassador, be he of the first or third rank, would fly into the face of the oldest publicists, if he should discharge his debts; now he who is the mere representative and brimstone printed copy of the regent, cannot possibly have rights which are denied the original, consequently is not paid. Secondly: The prince is--or else we can no longer believe another word of our academical afternoon lessons--the true summary, abstract and representative of the State (as the envoy, again, is a representative of the representative or aportable statein small), and consequently so stands for each member of the body politic that lends him a kreutzer, as if he himself were that member; accordingly he in reality lends to himself, when such a part and parcel of his representative self makes him a loan. Very well! that is granted; but then one must also grant that a prince would make himself as ridiculous if he should pay back to his own subjects, as the father of General Sobouroff did when he honorably refunded to himself the capital which he had advanced to himself, with the legal interest of the country, and paid the penalty to himself according to the statutes of exchange; whence could it come then, except from their relationship to the throne and its privileges, that even great ones, great in reference to rank and amount of debts, were allowed to become bankrupt? Or why is a legal consensus book or register of mortgages the most exact Court Blue-book orAlmanac royal? Thirdly: The most botched subject can secure from his prince letters of respite ormoratoria; but who shall give them to the prince, unless he does it to himself? And if he does not do it for conscience sake, he can at least every five years grant a renewed quinquennial.
But there is no fourth reason that I know of.
So now, Falkenberg has a tutor, the hope of the 13,000 Rixthalers, and a cadetship for his son--all he wanted now was recruits. These, too, were brought in to him and his under-officers in abundance by the Moloch-of-Moles, Robisch: but I know not what the clients meant, that, when Robisch had once secured his brokerage and they their christening-present, they for the most part made-off with the latter. In the Maussenbach woods thieves fell upon the transport and at the end of the battle thieves and transports had both fled from the field. This afflicted the Captain sorely, because he, who for himself and his family never committed the most profitable injustice, sometimes allowed a small one on the recruiting ground.
To the quiet Gustavus the noisy city-winter brought the longest hours. He saw no white head-band and no black lamb go by, without flying over on a sigh back to his enchanted wall and into the midst of his summer joys. When the ill-bred posterity of Hoppedizel looked upon him as stupid, because he was not crafty, and proud because he was not loud, he stanched the bleeding of his inner man, which was teased and ridiculed, with the thought of the beings who had loved him, of his Genius and his Shepherdess. For the sake of his Amandus he would so gladly have had another neighborhood than Hoppedizel's, even the grounds and the free sky of his home! He loved to have things still and snug around him, and to be encircled with the immensity of nature. Oh! when thou art once beside me, darling, how will I indulge and love thee! Thine eye shall never be clouded beside my desk of instruction, thy heart never heavy! Thou, tender plant, shalt not be tied to me with cutting pack-threads as to a straightening hop-pole, but with living ivy-roots shalt thou of thyself twine around me, as a living thing!
On the whole in Hoppedizel's home they led a confounded dog's life, as I myself often witnessed, when I and the master of the house in a dispute on the first principles of morals had each other, in a moral way merely, by the hair: for all, meanwhile, had a hand and its match in the business, but physically; one dog was pitted against another dog, the boys against the girls--the servants against one another--the heads of the house against the servants--the Professor against the Professoress, whereof a memorable fact is to be printed--and all these alternately against each other according to the law of Permutation.
Unfortunately Hoppedizel never had any respect (and consequently no disrespect either) for anybody; he borrowed on all sides, soiled all he touched, compromised every one, pardoned everybody and himself first of all. In the Captain's winter quarters the oil-painted tapestry (24 groschen the yard) formed a Spanish wall or screen between the Captain's empty room and the cracks in the wall for the bugs to pass through; the stove was good, but, like the tower of Babel, without a cupola; the ceiling of the apartment threatened (though, like many throne-canopies, for a long time without actual damage) to break down and crush the heads of the greatest philosophers, who stood, in stone, on the pier-table. He, therefore, had often little tenderness for people, because he took for granted that they had too much of it to scold at the invisibleness of his;--in Lower Scheerau we do just so. But now comes the catastrophe which hastened the flight of us all.
The Professor, we must premise, had, like most people, no taste in furniture; he had the greatest fancy for placing the best among the poorest, the finest piece of crockery under an ancestral bed and over against it a sandy wash-bowl; a nicely cleaned servant's livery behind the cast-off clothes of his children, etc. Now, he always committed a breach of the peace against his wife by never coming home empty; he had always been buying something that was good for nothing; he had the weakness of innumerable men, of making believe he understood house-keeping as well as his wife, when he was a mere beginner. Things which one sees, for a long time, others doing, one comes to think at last that he can do himself. She had the weakness of numberless women, of flattering herself into the presumption that her lord and master was an ignoramus in house-keeping, and never could learn it, however much he might wish to. "Do I have any say about your books?" asked the very coarse-bodied Professoress. One could, therefore, at every furniture auction, or at every annual fair in a calendar of practical matters, prophesy, in connection with the wars of great lords, that here a little war would break out between the connubial potentate and the other hostile power; because the latter could not endure his commercial treaty; the married couple celebrated then its Olympic games of tongues and hands, and could mark off the divisions of time since their marriage by these Olympiads.
Still more! Our new Regent--as in Italy, the people get the palace of the deceased Doge or Pope gratis--let the furniture of his illustrious father be sold at auction for a song; he did it, as all Crown princes do, out of respect for him, so that the people might inherit a souvenir of the departed, as the Roman people did the gardens of Cæsar. The Professor proposed to himself, therefore, to inherit and purchase. He bid, therefore, for the benefit of the Captain, in whose chamber the commode, the looking-glass, and the chairs were miserable objects--not upon those three objects, but upon three to match them--upon two elegant bronze vases, with goats' heads and myrtle leaves, for the miserable commode; upon a straight-legged pier-table, with pointed feet, to go under the miserable looking-glass; upon a splendid bergére to stand between the miserable chairs. The whole was knocked off to him. His first word, as he went from the auction room into his own, was to his wife: "Is the Captain up stairs? I have bought some elegant things for him." At this she sang the first verse of her war-song, without having yet noticed a single article of his purchase. He did not name one of them to her; for he had the greatest misfortune of a husband, namely, contempt for his wife, just as she, on the contrary, took his part against all persons, even the best, only not against herself. During the unpacking of the purchases he responded to the first verse of the war-song, yet did not name an article; and no they merely kept up an antiphonal chanting. At last the goats' heads and pointed feet were set down in the house. Then broke loose the war-cry: "That is stupid, stupid, stupid! Ha! you stupid man, you! the stuff! the rubbish! where were your five senses to-day! I wont pay a doit (besides she was never treasurer), and so dear! But when children and fools go to market!"
Quite coolly he said: "Just see that no harm comes to them, and take them up to the Captain, my sweet!" She obeyed on the instant; but then went into his room and opened all the sluices of her roaring wrath. At a late period of this roaring he said, at last, threateningly: "You know, wife!..." Now the wind grew to a storm in her mouth. He was not the man to be carried away by anger or any other passion, but he was a genuine Stoic, and always himself; hence, it is easily explained how, as Epictetus and Seneca advise Stoics to make up for the forbidden inward anger by the outward show of the same, so as to get the upper hand of people, he too diligently availed himself of his show of anger, and quickly petrified his fist and threw this bunch as afire-ballat those members of his spouse, which were devoid of light in the matter. This blunt Wilsonian conducting-knob of her anger was the first thing to draw forth from her the greatest spark of eloquence; and, in fact, it is in marriage as in the old Republics, which (according to Hume's observation), never produced greater orators than in the stormy times of war. He made the material thing a mere vehicle of the mental, and accompanied his hand with fragmentary extracts from the manual of Epictetus: "I am really quite in my senses," said he, "but you will scream altogether too loud if I don't strike into the midst of it." His carnal arm continued to move upon her. "I shall just keep on," he continued, "meanwhile, thank God that your husband has so much composure, that he can weigh everything he does!" But she never grew cold till he grew heated; this she discovered, at any time, by his growing dumb as Socrates, and arming and winging his hand with his night-cap suddenly snatched down from its nail. In proportion as his stinging sunny friendliness before the irruption of her thunderstorms seemed hot to her, in the same degree was his cloudiness that followed disagreeably cold; in short, both parties played before and after the battle reversed parts. This time her anger found a crisis of relief, and vented its whole force upon the head of him who was sitting under the goat-headed vases on the bergére--the Captain. The latter at the first gazette of this disgusting war had his winter-things packed up in Scheerau, and his summer things unpacked in Auenthal, and went--yes, actually went away.
But he came near staying. For the rest I do not wish to see this pugnacious pair I have depicted with their marriage-rings turned into explosive rings, too much despised by the more refined connubial world that never descends to fisticuffs; for, verily, the corrosive, poisonous words which ooze out from the refined married couple upon each other, drop by drop, the slow annoyance, drawing like a blister, wherewith they undertake to wound and cure each other, only drives the sore deeper under the skin, and makes not the surgeon indeed, but the doctor, necessary.
I will now explain why the Captain came near staying.
Hoppedizel had one afternoon at his house, beside the Captain, five others, the lawyer Kolb, the raft-inspector Peuschel, an old carmen-maker [or rhyme-smith], a court-chamber cleaner, and a court page; for what does the reader care about the surnames of these people? He first drew the lawyer aside and said to him: He must play a joke to day and drink to the other four gentlemen in colored water, which they would take for wine, while they would become fuddled with real wine. "Very good," said the lawyer; "they shall all have cause to remember the lawyer." The same thing the Professor repeated to the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker, etc.; all answered: "Very good! they shall all remember the raft-inspector, the carmen-maker," etc. Every one meant to make fools of the other four; the Professor had his eye on five--all were successful.
At evening five baskets of colored water were brought into the room; each man placed himself behind his little table, and screwed out the cork-stopper from the bottle of quasi-wine. The first flasks of bottled water were drained by the company in silence; true cunning must needs dictate to the pleasure-party or water-party this appearance of gradual intoxication.
But now the solar system began itsdrawing-of-water. "The wine might be stronger," every one said; and would fain deceive every one. The lawyer with rosy-red nose-button moistened his clay with more water (instead of spirit) than he had drunk or made or wrung from other eyes in his whole eternitya parte ante. A man who becomes so capable of holding water, as he is, that he can hardly stand straight for--soberness, makes it easily credible to his other tippling confederates that it arises from drunkenness; and all smiled very much when he laughed.
The raft-inspector Peuschel led a whole stream of water into his stomach, and made his blood-veins water-veins; but he was half vexed that he should be compelled to cheat the rest with his make-believe guzzling, and longed secretly for a real drunkenness instead of the pretended.
The chamber-cleaner actually macerated and soaked himself through and through with the colored water, and almost drowned out his Gallic malady--he guzzled so in his malicious pleasure.
The page, who almost burst his stomach with drinking, fared worse; three days after, he was carried off by anincontinentia urinæ. The porous carmen-maker was the only one through whom a whole colored deluge glided in and out without doing any harm; he looked round gaily and satirically, and watched for the moment when his next neighbors behind the four tables should fall down dead drunk.
A burning barn might have been saved by the toasts they drank in their whale-like throats.... Now came the time when every one who was in the secret of the joke must appear drunk. They discoursed and gabbled at each other with prancing, overbearing tongues. The page and the polisher actually stretched themselves out into the room like two felled trees, and their puffed-up paunches, the world was to fancy, lay like wine-sacks on their tressles. The man of office opened his mouth and shut his eyes--the carmen-maker imagined he should be doing it in the maddest and most plausible manner, if, in the first place, he should swear, like real drunkards, that he was sober; secondly, if he should collapse against the bed-posts in such a way as to get a real bruise. Fortunately he did in fact get a wound greater than his drunkenness, and was on the point, out of revenge, of breaking out with the information that he had made fools of the quartumvirate and drunk only water. The Professor also was just about to let the cat out of the bag and expose the wine and everything--the rest were going to do the same, and already began to laugh simultaneously in the anticipation: when meanwhile, unfortunately the raft-inspector, who had long been satiated, had stolen away to the polisher and thievishly by way of antidote and alleviative to his imitated wine, pledged himself in the pretended original edition of the same, out of the polisher's (or Frotteur's) cup.... there was water in that too as in his. Quick as lightning and half-foolishly he sipped the cups of all the water-gods; in all was water. Then out he came with the whole story--and the whole marine went flying round and hob-a-nobbing with each other, and each had to say seriously whether he was full and fou'.[28]Unfortunately, the entire fraternity of practical jokers was sober. The Captain, who loved such pranks better than fastnight hens, transformed, from love of morals, the general pretense of drunkenness into pure sincerity, and carried out his plan by genuine wine. When, by and bye, the pentagon skipped homeward, and those five foolish virgins returned to their several abodes as five wise ones, though with an aqueous plethora, then he said: "Upon my soul, such a thing ought to be printed!" And in fact it is printed here.
I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes and tricks; and grimaces.
For all that, orforall that, the Captain liked him, because he saw him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one who had been the first totake him in--he would have done it out of honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another,e. g., the Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately, and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew, partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned, for one died by an apoplectic stroke."
But, as I said the Captain loved, and left him nevertheless.
Before our departure I gave back to all, particularly the Resident Lady von Bouse, the music I had borrowed of them; and to her, who had lent me so much that came from Italy, I lent something still better from Germany, namely, my sister Philippina: the same is to help train there the little daughter of the Lady Resident, though, under the delicate fingers of so talented a dame, she will herself receive more training than she gives. Only may she there never transform her lively, tremulous, gay, and yet sensitive, heart into a coquettish one! May she lighten for her Laura (the name of the lady's daughter) the yoke of a coquettish breeding, inasmuch as the poor child continually pines under the glass-bell of the window, wedges her body under the bedclothes in two ounces of whalebone, squeezes her little hands again, even at night, into the casing of gloves, and trains her little head backward, with lead on her locks. As is well known, her mother, the Lady Resident, lives half a league from town, at Marienhof, in the so-called New Palace, adjoining an old one, which, I believe, is let.
... But my retinue in this biography is, I perceive, becoming swollen with every sheet by more and more personages, so that my driving and turning are made more and more disagreeable. I would rather have been a Diet of the Empire and had millions of subjects and income, than this plaguy heptagon of characters, which it is so hard to drive into the right sections, and in which I myself am the most cross-grained. For I, as mere biographer, have the aid neither of Imperial Chamber nor of Executive-posse against my heptagon; but were I an Imperial Diet they would soon give me many a--promise.
Around our parting-carriage in Scheerau crowded: the jolly coldness of the Professor--the busy scream of his lady stoic--the delicate smile of the Pestilentiary with the fitchew-tails--the good heart of his sonny, who could hardly by any lies be torn from Gustavus--and my own grateful remembrances of invisible hours, of beloved beings and of all my dear school-girls. Alas, that man here below must see so much pass away before he himself passes!
On the way Gustavus's weeping continued to sound in upon our pensive silence; but the old man, whose own heart, indeed, was melted, at last grew wild about it, and said to me: "I see more and more that the Moravian" (he meant the Genius) "has softened him to a milk-sop; if you, Mr. Tutor, don't make him a bit tough, I shall one day have him a lachrymose soldier, who will hardly be fit for a chaplain; for evenhemust many a time know how to bring out a good round oath."
He carried the Moravian in his head as far as the little town of Issig, where the following soliloquy went on beside our carriage: "I am an ass and a regular out and out villain, a miserable varlet. Oh, I am a rascal altogether, and a notorious, reprobate old hell-brand! Ought I not to be sawed in halves and roasted, the devil that I am, the blockhead and beast!" All this came from a school-boy, around whom all his schoolfellows swarmed and clapped. "He talks," (said my Patron) "like a Moravian beast, who runs himself down, in order to run all others down still more." But not in the least: it was a poor devil who was hungry and humorous, and for whom the whole school had contributed bread crumbs and apples, on condition that he would do them the favor to abuse himself outrageously....
... Lovely Auenthal! is thy snow already gone?