Oefel kept his word. Fourteen days after this Professor Hoppedizel wrote to us that he was coming to fetch the new cadet. Now, what had been hitherto our wish became our grief. The bond between Gustavus and myself was to be strained and wrenched asunder; every book that we now read together afflicted us with the thought that each would finish it alone; I could hardly bear to teach anything more to my Gustavus, whose building-up I must hand over to strange architects, and every fair flower-ground was to us the garden-gate of the Eden which an armed cherub guarded against us.
The stormy months of his heart were now, too, drawing nearer. Besides, I had not plucked out feathers enough from the wings of his fancy nor driven him often enough out of his solitude. Therein his fancy sent its roots in through all the fibres of his nature and obstructed with the curtain of blossoms which adorned his head, the entrances of the outer light.
In truth, neither the rattling Mentor nor his books,i. e., neither the garden-shears nor the watering-pot nourish and color the flower, but the sky and the earth between which it stands--i. e., the solitude or society, in which the child spends the first budding moments of his growth. Society is the germinative power in the common-place child, who gives out his sparks only under external blows. But solitude is the best environment of the exalted soul, as a desert place sets off a palace; here it develops itself more harmoniously among congenial dreams and images than among heterogeneous utilitarian applications. So much the more reason have general excise-colleges to see to it that great poetic geniuses--no one of whom in fact can make a judicious chancery or finance officer--shall from the tenth to the thirty-fifth year be kept on the move through nothing but saloons, studies and town-halls, without having a still minute; else not one of them is to be transformed into an archive keeper or registrator. Hence too, the market-din of the great world so happily keeps all growth of fancy to the level of the earth.
I have often thought on this matter, and brought up many objections to my mind. Would not (I represented to myself), a more thorough school colleague, when thy Gustavus was lying on his back on the grass and dreaming to sink upward into the blue crater of the heavens, or with wings on his shoulder-blades to swim through the universe, drive him with his cane to a useful book? And, (said I), if I should say to the more thorough colleague it was all one on what a child's fancy wound its way upward, whether on a lackered staff, or on a living elm or on a black smoker's-tube, would not the colleague wittily reply, for that very reason it wasall one?
Meanwhile I, on my part, should also possess wit of my own; I should hit upon the reply: "Do you believe, then, Sir Confrater, that between the greatest knave and the greatest comic poet, whom you produce, there is any difference? Certainly, a good plan of a Cartouche differs from a good plan of the Poet Goldoni's in this, that the first acts, himself, the comedy, which the latter gets acted by players."
Gustavus was now in the midst of the fairest and most momentous decade of man's flight to the grave, namely, the second. This decade of life consists of the longest and hottest days; and--as the torrid zone increases at once the size and the venom of the beasts--so at the glow of youth there ripen, indeed, love, friendship, zeal for truth, the spirit of poesy, but also the passions with their poison-teeth and poison-bags. In this decade the maiden steals away out of the years she has laughed through, and hides her sadder eye under the same weeping-willow beneath which the still youth cools his breast and his sighs, which rise for something nearer than moon and nightingale. Happy youth! at this moment all graces take thy hand, the poetic, the female, and nature herself, and lay aside their invisibleness and draw thee into a charmed circle of angels. I said, nature herself; for about her there glow still higher charms than the picturesque; and man, for whose eye she was a mile-long portrait full of enchantments, can bring with him to her a heart which shall make out of her a Pygmalion's image that has a thousand souls and with them all embraces one.... Oh, it never, never comes back again, the second decade of our poor life, which has more than three high festival days; when it has once gone by, a cold hand has touched our breast and eye; what still finds its way into that, what still forces its way out from both, has lost the first morning-charm and the eye of the old man opens then only to a higher world where he will perhaps again become a youth!
Three days before the arrival of the Professor there was a great ghost-scare in the castle; two days before it still continued; one day before the Captain made arrangements for the detection of the trickery. He had a hydrophobia-like dread of ghost-stories and gave every servant who, like Boccaccio, told one, as payment for his novel, cudgelings, so many for every sheet. The Captain's wife vexed him by her credulity, and she often got that look from him which men give when the hopes or fears of their wives make hares' leaps of half the earth's diameter. She had heard at night a three-footed tramp through the corridor, a flash had shot through the keyhole and another clock than hers had struck twelve, and all had flown away.
He, therefore, loaded his double-barreled pistols, in order to attack the devil with the powder which the latter, according to Milton, invented earlier than the Chinese; his Gustavus must be with him at the time, for the sake of exercising his courage. The castle-clock struck eleven, nothing came--it struck twelve, still nothing--it struck twelve a second time, without help of the clock-work; at this moment a hieroglyphic racket made its way over the castle-floor, three feet tramped down the many steps and shook the corridor. He, who was seldom courageous insuffering, but always indanger, walked slowly out of the chamber and saw nothing in the long passage but the blown-out house-lantern on the top stair; something came up to him in the darkness--and as he was about to fire at the dumb thing, he cried: who's there? Suddenly there flashed five paces from him--and here the tetanus of horror seized the nerves of Gustavus--the light of a dark-lantern upon a face which hung in the air, and which said: "Hoppedizel!" It was he; he threw his boot-tree and other apparatus of this farce away, and no one had anything against it but the Captain, because he could not show his courage, and the Captain's wife, because she had not shown any.
But in Gustavus's brain this face, hanging in the air, scratched with the etching-needle a distorted image which his feverish fancies will one day hold up again before his dying eyes. It is not want of courage, but merely intense fancy that creates fear of ghosts, and whoso has once awakened that in a child so as to terrify him gains nothing, even if afterwards he refutes it again and teaches him that "it was all natural." Hence, in the same family, only certain children are timid,i. e., those of a lively and volatile fancy. Hence Shakespeare in his ghost scenes raises the hair of the incredulous one in the front box mountain high, evidently through his excited fancy. The fear of ghosts is an extraordinary meteor of our nature; first, because of its dominion over all peoples; secondly, because it does not come from education; for in childhood one shudders equally before the great bear at the door and before a ghost; but in the one case the terror fades away. Why does it remain in the other? Thirdly, on account of the object: the person who is afraid of ghosts dreads neither pain nor death, but shrinks from the mere presence of a being of an entirely foreign nature. He would be able to look upon an inhabitant of the moon, a resident of a fixed star, as easily as upon a new animal; but there resides in man a dread as if of evils which the earth knows not, of a wholly different world from what revolves around any sun, of things which trench more nearly upon the limits of our personality....
I could not well avoid recording the foolish trick of the Professor's, because, two days after, it conjured up around Gustavus, on the eve of his departure, the following scene, which might full as well have crushed as cheered his heart.
In the interval before his departure he carried his heavy heart and heavy eye to all places which he loved and was leaving, to the holy sepulchre of his childhood, under every tree which had shut out from him the sun, up every hill which had shown it to him--he went on through nothing but ruins of his tender child life; over his whole youthful Paradise the past lay like a flood; before him, behind him, stretched the marsh land and land of tillage, into which fate so soon drives man.
... This was the moment when, before the sun, which, like him, was going hence, and before the whole of great nature, which, with invisible hands lifts blind man into vast, pure, unknown regions, I pressed the likeness of his Guido,[52]which I had hitherto withheld from him, to my beloved scholar's heart; at such moments words are unnecessary, but every word one does speak has an almighty hand: "Here, Gustavus," said I, "here, before Heaven and Earth, and before all that is invisible around man, here I make over to thee from my guardian hands into thine five great things--I deliver to thee thy innocent heart--I deliver to thee thy honor--the thought of the Infinite--thy Destiny--and thy form, which also encloses Guido's soul. Not on the earth do the great hours stand, which will ask thee whether thou hast kept or lost these five great things--but they will one day compare thy future soul with thy present. Ah! let me not think of myself, if thou shalt have lost all!" ...
I went away without embracing him; the best feelings keep a firmer hold when one does not allow them to express themselves. He remained where he was, and his feelings turned toward the picture of Guido; but that had no power to remind him of his own form--for a man may have come to his twentieth year without knowing his own teeth, and to his twenty-fifth remain unacquainted with his own eyelashes, whereas a maiden shall know all about hers before her confirmation--but the picture woke to life again all of memory and love towards his Genius, his first educator, that slumbered within him; nay, he found in the likeness nothing but resemblances to his friend who had fled from him and saw his form in the painted nothing as in a concave mirror.
His brain burned on in dream, as he lay on his pillow, like a glowing anthracite coal-mine. It seemed to him as if he melted away into a dew-drop and a blue flower-cup drank him up--then the swaying flower stretched itself up with him to a great height and landed him in a lofty, lofty chamber, where his friend, the Genius, or Guido, was playing with his sister; and he dreamed that as often as the young man stretched out his arm towards him it dropped off, and his sister handed it to him again. All at once the flower collapsed, and falling downward he saw three white moonbeams bear his friend into heaven, who cast his eyes downward toward the fallen one. He woke--he was out of bed leaning at the open window which looked out over the garden into the sleeping Auenthal. The heavens came down in a dumb rain of light--throughout the gleaming universe nothing stirred save the scintillating points of the fixed stars--the houses stood like sepulchres in which mortals were taking their long sleep; dreams went in and out through the closed senses of men and sometimes death's tread clove asunder a head and the dream within it. Heaven seemed to Gustavus to have sunk down before his window. "Oh, turn back, come again, beloved!" he cried, transported at once by dream and present reality, "O thou wast there, thou wast seeking me! Ah, thou thousand times beloved! send me from thy heaven at least thy voice!" Unexpectedly something cut the air before the window and cried, "Gustavus," and in its distant flight called down twice from a higher and higher altitude, "Gustavus! Gustavus!" An iceberg fell upon his stiffening skin in the first second; but in the next he recovered his glow, gave his arms to death and to his friend, and concentrated his vision upon a spot in the air under the dazzling moonlight, in order to see something. The two worlds had now for him collapsed into one; calmly he awaited his friend from the world behind the suns and was ready to fall with earthly breast upon his ethereal one. He cooled off at last, and with a shudder of soul and a shiver of the skin went back to bed. But long will the emotions of his soul be wafted to him from this hour, as the winds blow from a region of a storm.
It was probably the work of the old starling, who, so far as I know, had escaped from his cage. Gustavus never knew it. Whether a soul like a standing-pool heaves its waves as high as the shirt-frills, or like the ocean mountain high, those are two things; whether these lofty emotions are excited by a starling or a saint in bliss, that is all one.
The Professor taught him, in my hearing, golden brocards[53]of practical wisdom, which he himself transgressed in his teaching,--e. g., Not merely the love but also the hatred of men is changeable, and both die unless they grow.--Most people speak against those vices only which they themselves have.--The greater the genius, the fairer the person, so much the more does the world pardon them; the greater the virtue so much the less does the world pardon it.--Every youth thinks none is like him in feelings, etc., but all youths are alike.--One must never excuse himself; for not the reason but the passion of another is provoked with us, and against that there is no argument but time.--Men love their pleasures more than their prosperity; a good companion more than a benefactor; parrots, lap-dogs, and monkeys more than useful beasts of burden.--One guesses what men are when one gives them credit for having no principles, and the suspicious man is always right; he guesses, if not theactions, yet thethoughtsof another; thedefeatsof the bad and thetemptationsof the good.--The sin against the Holy Ghost, which no one forgives thee, is the sin againsthisspirit,i. e., against his vanity, and the flatterer pleases, if not by his conviction, yet by his humiliation. Etc.
There are certain rules and means of knowing human nature which the higher and better man despises and condemns, which he is just the one not to be helped by in guessing character, and which neither instruct nor reveal him. The Professor further advised my Gustavus to form his face, to silhouette virtue upon it, to smooth it out before the looking-glass, and not to rumple or ruffle it by intense emotions. I know full well that with the world's people themirroris still the only conscience which holds up their faults before them, and which, like the brain, must be divided into the larger and the lesser; the great conscience consists of wall and pier-mirrors, the little one consists ofetuis, and is drawn out as a pocket-looking-glass; this for the world's people; but for thee, Gustavus----? Thou, who can'st neither accept, nor even understand, least of all use, the above Decalogue for knaves--for one understands and finds useful only such rules of life as rest upon experiences which he has himself so passed through, that he himself could have given the rules--thou, whom I have taught that virtue is nothing butreverencefor our own personality and that of others; that it were better to believe in no vices than in no virtue; that the worst know only their own caste, and the best, one beside----? ... If Gustavus had not risen in rebellion against those teachings, which are mostly truths, and against the teacher of them; if he had not sworn that this disgusting cancer-philosophy should never spin and fasten itself upon a corner of his heart; then should I not have thought even as well of him as of the Resident Lady von Bouse, to whom the system of Helvetius seems as beautiful as her own face; for in her station the best heart has often the worst philosophy.
It will hardly reward the trouble, that I should add here that the rascal Robisch was chased to the devil, because he gave out and reckoned in a runaway recruit for a new one. If I said "chased to the devil," I was satirizing, for it was only to Herr von Röper, who accepts no servants except such as are Polyhistors[54]in livery, like Robisch,i. e., who are at once hunters, gardeners, scribes, peasants, and servants.
"Go thy way, beloved," said I, "whom the world-sea bears along with it; may the solar image of thy shy and sensitive heart smile up out of the watery depths and swim along with thee! Thy young heart thou wilt bring to Auenthal no more! Alas, that the fruits of man's life must have a different weather from that of his blossoms, instead of the breath of Spring the sting of August and the autumnal tempest!" Such were my thoughts so long as his carriage remained in sight; after that I went down into the garden-vault to the two monks, and as I thought: in your cold stony breasts dwells no wish, no longing, no sorrow, and--no heart: "for that very reason," said I in another sense.
To-day is Michaelmas, and to-day--I can no longer dissemble--his departure isa year old. To-day begins, between me and the reader, a wholly new life, and we will quietly settle it all with one another beforehand.
In the first place, it is true, I am a year behind Gustavus's life; but I think in eight weeks to have written up to it. I expected, indeed, half a year ago, thatnowI should overtake him; but a life is easier to lead than to picture, especially in a good style. On the whole an author--a good one--can more easily reckon the stars in heaven than his future sheets, which are also stars. Finally, one expects that the Literary Times will consider at least so much as this, that I, as a counsellor-at-law, cannot possibly write so much for it as for whole colleges, faculties, and supreme courts of the empire. Is the Literary Times aware of the terrible amount of my labors? One should have seen my cupboard full of professional papers, whereon, moreover, not a word is yet written, because I have only just received them from the paper-mill; or one should have been in my judicial district of Schwenz, where the twelve subjects and the feudal lord and judge are themselves peasants, in order to require of me nothing more than a book a year. Where is the lawyer throughout all Scheerau, who serves in a suit, that might shortly--for the devil must have his sport--have been made to stretch out through the Wetzlar gate under the session table of the imperial chancery, which knows all about good style? And yet the suit, like Peter the Great, served from below upward, and mounted, like the sect of Stylites, higher and higher seats.
Secondly, unless this is still firstly, I can, consequently, like the Jews, only on the Sabbath, or Sunday, think upon the plastic of my spiritual embryos; on week days nothing is written, except, to be sure, biographies also, but only those of rogues, by which is meant protocols and accusatory libels.
Secondly (or thirdly), I am the inmate of a schoolmaster's establishment. The good Captain, when his son was out of his door, undertook to put me under personal arrest, which in my case includes also real arrest, because my real estate consists of my body, and my personal property of my soul; he said I should stay in his palace and advocate and satirize as long as I pleased. It were to be wished his old judge would fade away, then I should be the new one, for his good heart--which my knavish one, accustomed to court subtleties, cannot always forgive for its want of them--cannot bear to dismiss anybody. Still keep thy sound north-east breath; still keep those hands of thine with their cudgelling-stick of a woe-unto-thee! and thy tongue, with its two or threethunders! and thousand devils! my Falkenberg!
And I stayed with him through the winter; but early in the spring of this year I moved down to the place where I now write--in the upper chamber of the Auenthal schoolmaster, Sebastian Wutz.[55]I had, perhaps, the three weightiest reasons in the world for this step; in the first place, nowhere do I feel so shrivelled up as in a Vatican full of dreary caverns, in Sahara wastes of empty apartments; a dining-hall with its poverty of furniture is to me a Patmos, and only in little snug sitting-rooms does one feel enlarged. Man should from year to year creep into smaller and smaller cells, until he slips into the smallest,i. e., into the narrowest hole of this compressed silver wire ["silver cord"].
The second reason was, Herr Fortins (in Morhof. Poly hist., L. II., c. 8), who advises literary men to change their towns every half-year,--and, in fact, one does write better after any change, and though it were only that of a writing-desk. Without such freshening of the air the soul writes itself so deeply into its narrow pass that it is caught there without being able to see sky or earth. The present work may, perhaps, come to something; but every month and every section I must write in a different cabin.
The third and soundest reason is my sister. She has come back again from the Resident Lady von Bouse's, because she had to vacate her place for a fair book-patient, namely, the good Beata, whom father, doctor, lover--the stupid Oefel (but he finds not the least favor)--have at last tempted into this confluence of all enjoyments and visitings. Secondly, my sister is here, because I would so have it; but Sister, Sister, why did not I snatch thee sooner out of this overrunning mineral-whirlpool? Why hast thou so changed? Who can change thee back again? Who will wipe out of thy heart thy thoughts that forever recur to strange glances; thy eagerness to be admired but not loved; thy coquetry, which seeks only to excite love, not to reciprocate it, and all that distinguishes thy heart from thy former heart and from the unchangeable heart of Beata? I would not, therefore, with my sister, make the palace narrower, where, besides, she already, every day, sits away two or three hours.
I have now explained to the reader what he is about. We return to Gustavus's carriage, and are all satisfied--reader, printer and writer.
Gustavus, in an intoxication of sorrow, which the lovely heavens dissolved in tears, drove on to Scheerau, and counted every bee and every swallow that flew towards our palace, happy. The next ten years hung down like ten dark curtains before him. "And," he asked himself, "do skeletons, wild beasts, or paradises lie behind the curtains?" The thing which, without curtain, sat before him and lectured, he did not see--namely, the Professor. Two leagues this side of Scheerau he wrote to me with that flaming gratitude which breaks forth from a man so radiantly only in his second decade. As in the case of all souls which alter more from within outwardly than from without inward, the barometer of the heart stood within him, often immovable at the same degree. The rain-clouds and the rainbow in his inner heaven he carried with him to Scheerau; he bore his veiled heart into the wide, echoing cadet barracks, into the fair-day-tumult on its stairs, and into the noise of watchwords, as if into the midst of the hammerings of a copper foundry and a fulling mill. He grew still sadder, but more painfully so.
The remarkable thing in the chamber which he entered and was to occupy, was not the presence of three cadets--for they werecurrentmen, small change and prosaic souls,i. e., jolly, witty, devoid of feeling, without interest in higher wants, and of moderate passions--but it was the Ephorus of the chambers, Herr von Oefel, who skipped about with his sword at his side like an impaled fly with his needle. Oefel began at once to observe him in order to describe him at evening; but in company he observed everybody, not in order to overhear others' tricks, but to exhibit his own. So, too, he praised without esteeming, and blackened without hating. He wanted merely to shine.
Amidst these circumstances, before Gustavus made the heavy passage through sorrows to occupations, a solace came to him in the form of memory, and he saw, what he should not have forgotten--hisAmandus, his childhood's friend. But the good youth came before him not in his first form of a blind boy, but in his last, of a dying man. He had a nervous consumption, which had sucked all the pith out of the still standing bark of the tree of life. On the bark there lingered no green save hanging twigs with pale drooping foliage. He was preparing himself for no office or life, but was expecting and stood ready to receive at the threshold of the hereditary sepulchre Death coming up the steps. But that his soul lay in a living wound[56]--there is nothing in that to surprise us except hissex; for the fairest female souls seldom live otherwise; but men do not spare such wound; the spectacle does not soften them towards so soft a sex, that most of them live, not from day to day, but from sorrow to sorrow and from tear to tear....
In Gustavus the second self (his friend) dwelt almost under one and the same roof with the first, under the skull and skin of the brain; I mean, he loved in others less what he saw than what he conceived; his feelings, in fact, were nearer and more compact about his ideas than about his senses; hence the flame of friendship which streamed up so high before the image of a friend, was often bent and blown aside by his bodily presence. Hence he received his Amandus (since in general an arrival creates less glow than a departure) with a warmth which did not quite reach from his inner to his outer man--but Oefel, who observed it, wormed out the secret with six glances: that the new cadet was proud of his nobility.
Of all military catechumens Gustavus had the most thorny time. From a still Carthusian monastery he had been banished to a lumber-room, where the three cadets bombarded his ears all day long with thrusts of rapiers, slaps of cards and curses--from a country castle he had been thrown into a Louvre, where the drum was the organ of speech and the speaking machine, through which the mastership talks with the scholars, as the grasshopper makes all his noise with an inborn drum attached to his belly. To eating, to sleeping and to waking, they were, like the pit of a village player, drummed together. In march-time and following the word of command this militia mounted the dining-hall as their wall and brought nothing away from the fortification but their portion of victuals for half a day. The gesture of command started them up from their seats and led them out again from the citadel. One could at night count the steps of a single cadet, and one knew those of all the rest, because the word of command like a blast drove all these wheels at once.--For this very reason, I mean because grace before meat was regularly commanded, the whole corps had the same devotions, no one spoke with God a second longer than another. I know not to which of the Scheerau regiments the fellow belonged who once, at a church parade, when the officer for once commanded the souls to go to God, which he generally ordered to go to the Devil, so flagrantly rebelled against reasonable subordination, as to crook his pious knee before Heaven at least four minutes longer than the file-leader;--I mention it for this reason, that I afterward, when the pray-er got a whipping for it, publicly propounded the question, whether in this same way one might not train the companies in logic, which is as necessary to them as the mustache and even more useful, since the latter, but not the former, needs brushing. Might not one give the command, only leaving out the word "make": "make the major proposition--make the minor--make the conclusion?" Thus no one could blame me, if I should buy me a company, and make them go through the three parts of the Penance somewhat in this way: Repent--Believe--Reform--namely yourselves, or else the ---- shall strike you--as younger officers add.
The Austrian soldiers had, until the year 1756, seventy-two manual movements to learn, not for smiting the enemy, but Satan.
While in this mood towards war and his comrades, Gustavus wrote a letter to me, of which I omit the beginning, because in that part our correspondent used always to be as cold as at the reception of a friend.
* * * * *
"---- Exercising and studying make me quite another man, but not a happier one. I am often vexed myself at my weakness, at my eyes, from which I privately seek to wipe away all traces of emotion, and at my heart, which, at offences such as I now frequently experience, though certainly without the intention of the offenders, does not boil up with passion, but compresses itself as if into a great tear over the wicked world. My chums, among whom I hear nothing but rapier-thrust and curses, ridicule me in everything. Even this writing I am not doing in their sight, but under the open heavens in theSilent Land[57], at the feet and on the pedestal of a flower-goddess, whose arm and flower-basket have been broken off. The worthy Herr von Oefel is meanwhile at the Resident Lady's, in the old palace.
"Whenever I am not at work, every room, every house, every face confines and oppresses me. And yet when I resume it--that is, when it is foul weather, as it was last week, I open my case of mathematical instruments as fondly as if it were a casket of jewels; but when a fiery morning, amidst the screaming of all the birds, even theimprisonedones, pours down from the roofs into our streets, when the postillion reminds me with his horn that he has just come out from the angular, dingy, dilapidated, unorganically glued-together rubbish heaps of killed nature, which they call a city, into the pulsing, swelling, budding fullness of unmurdered nature, where one root clambers about another, where all things grow together and into each other, and all lesser lives twine together into one great infinite life; then every drop of blood in my heart recoils from the pitch-hoops, trench-cavaliers, and from the sponges with which the artillery stuff and stifle our blue morning hours. Nevertheless, I forget blooming nature and the counter-mines wherewith they are learning to blow it up into the air, and see merely the long crapes which stream out on high from the poles at the house of a dyer opposite, even as nights hang over the faces of poor mothers, that the dew of grief may fall in the dark behind the corpses which we are learning to make on the morrow.----Ah! since I have learned there is no longer any dyingfor, but onlyagainstthe fatherland; since I have learned that if I sacrifice my own life, I save none but only enslave one; since that I have been compelled to wish that when war one day shall draw me into the work of killing, it will first burn my eyes blind with powder, that I may not see the breast I stab, nor pity the fair form which I mutilate, and may only die, but not kill.... Oh, while I still looked out into the world from the monastery, from your study chamber, then did it expand before me in fairer and grander dimensions with waving woods and flaming capes and meadows painted in thousandfold colors--now I stand upon that same earth and see the bold needle-pine with miry roots, the black boggy pond and the pasture of one mowing full of yellow grass and draining ditches.
"Perhaps, however, I might still better realize my dreams of being useful to men, if I should strike into another path, and were permitted to choose, instead of the battle-field, the session-table, and so ennoble the object of sacrifice.[58]The red sun stands before my pen and besprinkles my paper with running shadows. O thou workest standing, heavenly diamond! and illuminatest like the lightning, but without its murderous knell! All nature is mute when it creates and loud when it destroys. O great Nature, standing in evening's fire! man should imitate only thy stillness and be merely thy feeble child, carrying forth thy blessings to the needy!
"If you look up to-day from Auenthal at the windows of our castle flickering in the summer-gold, so does my soul also at this moment look over, but with a sigh," etc....
The officers see clearly that Gustavus never will be one; but he has against him the whole of his father, who loves only the storming warrior and scorns more quiet business-men, as they in their turn despise the still more quiet businessless scholar.
When, on the following Thursday, I set out to visit my Gustavus and instruct him a little, behold Herr von Oefel, for a reason which it will take a whole section to unfold preliminarily and profoundly, has despatched him with a body of Hussars to the borders, where they were to form a frumentary cordon, which should let no grain go out and no pepper come in. Since most popular movements take their rise inperistalticones [those of the stomach], many people of fine sense would have it they nosed out that the sovereign did the thing in order that his subjects might have the means of living.
But I was brought at last into the greatest scrape with it all, and one shall now hear how the matter was, but it must be from the very beginning.
Namely, thus: the great Manor of Maussenbach has, as it is well known, the supreme jurisdiction, although I and Mr. Commercial Agent von Röper are vexed at it, on opposite grounds. I am vexed because I see the life, at least the honor, of some hundreds of people in the hands, not of a whole Roman people, but of a single official, etc.; the hereditary, feudal and juridical lord is vexed, because the criminal court brings in nothing, since it costs more to have the executioners sword sharpened than all comes to which is mowed down by it into the treasury. "Adultery is the only thing left for the criminal magistracy!" says the hereditary lord. Quite the opposite said his justice, Kolb; high criminal trials were his high opera, penal acts were his Klopstock's odes, and a constable his Orestes and Sancho Panza. He would have divided the people into two classes, the hanging and the hanged, and he would have remained criminal prosecutor. An unshaven malefactor in prison was to him a Chinese goldfish in a glass bowl, both were shown to guests. Free hunt after scoundrels only in two or three quarters of the globe would have been his business and pleasure. He hated me to death, because I had defended a man against him and saved him from death and got him into the penitentiary. He possessed the necrology of all who had been executed and a matriculation or genealogical register of all robbers (except robbers of honor) who stood ripe for reaping, and genuine knaves were for him what well-disposed men were for the biographic Plutarch. In brief, he was a genuine criminal prosecutor, just as the old German or modern English laws would have him; for according to both every man must be judged and sentenced only by his peers; but Kolb every knave and murderer could claim to be as great a one as himself, and consequently the culprit could say that he enjoyed the legal benefit of being tried by one of his peers. I know not many contemporary criminal counsellors and members of faculties to whom this could be applied.
This annoyed Röper exceedingly, for his criminal counsellor brought upon him every month a case that involved enormous expenses; and high criminal judges are not so well served by the securing of criminals as by keeping up the succession. In short, when the magistrate thought to undertake a new levy of gallows recruits in the woods of Maussenbach, for whichperhapsRobisch was to blame, Herr von Röper would nullify these thief-pressgangs by offering as many insults to his criminal counsellor as were necessary to bring it about that the magistrate could do no less than resign.
He did, to be sure, one thing more, the rascal, he drew a picture of my littleness. As he could not forget my defensive argument, he acted the fiscal attorney, and told Röper I was good for nothing. I was a man who hated him and sundry other noblemen, and who had the finest court-style; Paul took every case of subjects against their liege-lord, and had once even plied his quill against his honor the Commercial Agent. Thou wretch of a Kolb! Why should not One-legs do that? My most important cases are to this very day no other. And why should not, in fact, a proposition be realized which I will forthwith make? This, namely, that, after the pattern of the poor man's attorney, there should be instituted people's attorneys, who should contend merely against patrimonial tribunals, as the Knights of Malta do against infidel ones.
I have it from Röper's own mouth; for, in short, he installed me, to be sure, as Maussenbach--magistrate, let the advocating and reading world be as much astonished as it will. The Kolbian attacks were my very spiral stairway to this judicial bench. My judicial principal must needs, in his eternal battles with all instances and noble folk, have a juristicTaureadorvigorous pen-harpooner; but Kolb said I was one. Secondly, Herr von Röper presented me the bench of justice, because I neither rode (on account of my short leg) nor drove (on account of my sea-sick stomach), and consequently would go on foot to the administration of justice without the bevy of horses which his stable otherwise must furnish as perquisites. For reviewers and their editors the hint will do no harm, that they would be pleased to consider and from this time take paper and review a man who is not, like themselves, nothing; but one who sits in judgment as well as they, but over a more real life than the literary, and who can even hang such reviewers, if within his jurisdiction they steal anything but reputation.
Now comes the main thing. I was for the first time, as judge, in Maussenbach and entered upon the duties of my office. All went very well; I and my subjects were presented to each other, and I had on this day over five hundred hands in mine. Of course I had still to smooth down many an ugly face, which they made at me, because they had been in the habit of making it at my little-loved principal; for people and nobles, not merely in Rome, but also in our villages now-a-days, are always in each other's hair and fighting like cats and dogs about financial matters. Beside my magistracy, something else celebrated a birthday to-day--the patron himself, Röper; we feasted, therefore, right well in honor of two things; first, because the parliament which he had dissolved was in me to-day convoked again; and secondly, because the summoner had, many years before, been born. I can say, I had a good time of it, despite my unlikeness to the new born one--of thee I am not at all speaking, Louisa and judicial Patroness!--what lame heart would not beat in sympathetic harmony with thine, when it saw thy eye glisten at the pleasure of thy husband and with wishes for his welfare? But it is of thy wedded lord himself I speak: let him be, now, what he will, it is impossible for me, in regard to a man with whom I sit under the same keeping-room ceiling, to think the evil which I have hitherto heard or even believed of him, and it is really not the same thing, whether a highway or only a table is between us. If thou hatest a man from hearsay; then go into his house and see whether, when thou hast discovered in his conversation so many friendly traits, in his behavior toward the child or the wife whom he loves so many signs of affection, whether, then, thou goest out again with the hatred which thou broughtest in. If the present author was ever in his life prepossessed against anything, it was against the great; but since, in his musical lessons at Scheerau, he has the opportunity of standing under the same ceiling with many a great one, since he has himself skipped round among these giants; he sees that a minister who oppresses his people may love his children, and that the misanthrope at the session-table may be a philanthropist at the sewing-table of his wife. Thus the Alpine peaks have in the distance a bold and steep aspect, but near to, room enough and good plants.
I confess, therefore, when according to ancestral usage (on birthdays at court I never tasted the like) a tart or turnover was brought on, on which the Vivat and the name Röper could be read and eaten set in types of almonds--when, furthermore, the proprietor of the name said indeed: "this now is one of thy stupid tricks," but immediately had his eye fill with moisture and added: "cut out a piece for our people also outside," I confess, I say, I could at that moment have wished my memory rid of many a saying I had heard of him which did not well comport with the lapidary almond style, and I would especially have given something, the crabs most readily, if he had not been so troubled about the bits of gravel in their heads, and scolded so at his Louisa, who in her joy had scattered in sundry contributions to his crabdactyliothecaor collection of pebbles. I will just be candid, the deuce might have taken me, if I could have borne to remain hard as a crab-eye, when thou, my music-pupil, beloved Beata, who from the court-air[59]as other flowers do from the mephitic, hadst imbibed nothing but tenderer charms and a higher enamel--when thou, fair pupil, with a feminine sense of paternal respectability, didst go up to thy father and with thy lips on his hand, offer him the most sincere wishes, and when only on the neck of thy mother, who showered upon you both looks of love, thou didst let thy heart overflow into a more congenial one....
I come now to the promisedmain thing--namely, my Gustavus. I wish he had stayed away. He rode in advance of two Hussars, who were escorting a grain-wagon. The wagon was going to discharge its load beyond the limits--(the principality of Scheerau, like the human understanding, everywhere runs against limits)--the two Hussars were ready to be bribed, so far all was agreeable; but Gustavus was not; the conductor, the farmer, had given out that the smuggled goods were Röper's property--and from Röper the whole of Gustavus recoiled from his very fathers loins. Secondly, he was living now in bridal relations with virtue, and in the honeymoon, when one regards good works and moralhors d'œuvre[works of supererogation] as one and the same thing, and when style and virtue alike have too much fire. In short, farmer and wagon must go back; and the Cadet had burst into the birthday chamber to make the announcement with over-boiling indignation against Röperish treacheries. But was he in a fit frame to do this when he saw me again after many weeks and my fair scholar for the first time, and when he found himself among the faces glowing with friendship, from which he would at once banish blood and joy? The most he could do was to draw me aside and disclose to me all; but the overhearing neighborhood and the impetuouscorpus delictidiscovered the same to the Commercial Agent. Without ceremony he broke out into a furious tirade against the Cadet, who, as he said, had nothing to do with the matter, and continued rising to a climax in his fury, till a remedy occurred to him for the whole disaster. I had to go out with him before the street door and there he told me I could, as his magistrate, easily see that one must needs give out the grain as the property of the farmers, because the Prince would have no mercy on an official. This last assertion I, as his new magistrate, could well understand, that the covetous, arsenical king, who could tolerate office-trading, judicial misdemeanors, and the like, would nevertheless come down like a poisonous wind upon all disobedience to himself; but this I could not see through, that a second treason must needs be the abattis and advocate of the first. In the midst of our fight came running up at length the object of it, the farmer himself, who broke in with distorted visage and with the stammering entreaty that "His Grace would not ungraciously remark the fact that he in his bewilderment had given outhisgrain asHis Grace's own." Now the knot was untied; my principal had until now merely confounded his own smuggled goods which had been successfully brought over the frontier with arrested goods of another party. To the farmer he forthwith, as a sound moralist, represented the wickedness of deceiving at once himself, the country, and the Prince, "and he wished he would break open now the writing of the Government, he would deliver him up on the spot." He hastened in to my Gustavus and hurled at him, with the heat of misunderstood innocence, as many coarsenesses as one might expect from an offended demi-millionaire, since gold possessors, like gold strings, sound the harshest. I pitied my dear Gustavus with his plethora of virtue; he pitied the ill-luck of the poor farmer, and Beata pitied our confusion all round. With boiling emotions Gustavus fled out of a dumb apartment, where he had broken off from the tenderest heart that ever trembled under a fair form, that of Beata, the flowers of childish joy, and dashed them to the ground.
In fact, now at length the old Harry was loose--namely, the howling of Röper's rage against the house of Falkenberg and its abominable extravagance, and against the Cadet. Beata was silent; but not I. I should have been a scoundrel (a greater one, I mean) if I had allowed extravagance, in the sense in which the adversary meant it, to be imputed to the Captain. I should, moreover, have been stupid (or stupider) if I had not in my first official act endeavored to accustom him to opposition, instead of waiting till the tenth or twentieth.... But the oil which I poured round for the purpose of smoothing his waves, dropped into fire instead of water. Little did it help either of us, that my pupil played upon us with the richest passages out of Benda's Romeo, the old hilarity was not to be brought back again; we twitched and twisted our faces to no purpose. Röper looked like an Indian cock and I like a European. I had intended, toward evening, after moon-rise, to be somewhat sentimental in the presence of Beata, seeing, besides, that the Count tore her away from me. I am certain I should have had sensibility and sentiment adequate to the occasion. I should, under the shade of a tree, have taken out my heart and said,prenez. Nay, I seemed even to-day to draw Beata much nearer to me than usual, a thing in which one prospers with all maidens with whose parents one has business associations. But all that was now gone to the old Harry. I was compelled to make my exit cold and hard as a page of the exchequer, and felt miserably. If the new magistrate was provoked, who had thus been ushered into his new office in a cloud of vexation, his principal was still more so, who had been escorted by a jar and jangle into his new year. So I limped off and said to myself all the way, "thus, then, and with such face and aspect art thou hieing home, happy Paul, from thy Maussenbach judgeship, of which thou hast boasted so much in thy former sections. Thou need'st not rise on my account, O moon; I need not to-night thy powdered face. That single, confounded grain-wagon! and the Prince! and the skin-flint, too! and even youthful virtue! Would that ye all.... But had I only been as sensible and felt as much in the very forenoon, and had I only, before dinner, shown forth something of my heart, an auricle, a fibre.
"Heigh! Mr. Magistrate," cried my Wutz, coming to meet me; "here again! Hast had fine cases of adultery, harlotry, riots, defamations?"
"Merely a few defamations," I replied.