[38]As in the State.—V. or Von,de,of, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.—Ed.I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know, if on a more accurate summation they find this number incorrect.[39][39]In Erlang, my petition has been granted. TheBible Institutionof that town have found instead of the 116,301 A's, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. SeeLüdeke's Beschr. des Türk. Reichs(Lüdeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).Much also did the Quintuscollect: he had a fineAlmanac Collection, aCatechismandPamphlet Collection; also aCollection of Advertisements, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on hisAlphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books, where my name also occurs among the J's.But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh—, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned whomeantto write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few: for example, of the Learned, who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,—of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,—in their twentieth—twenty-first, &c.,—in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[40]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[41]).[40]Paravicini Singularia de viris claris. Cent. I. 2.[41]Ejusd. Cent. II.Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about the quantity of a syllable: the prize or bet was the beard of the vanquished. Timotheus lost his.Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labours: but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad; it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, toconcert-clocks, which,though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross stupidsteeple-clocks.To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling-trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit: for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past, he committed to certain little leaves, which merit our undivided attention. For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separateletter-boxes. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c. of his twenty-first year, and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.And here must I in reference to those reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother: this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment, dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves. It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.—O good mother, rather thank God for it!—After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigour for his desk,he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regularlittleforms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glass-house of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently: he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of colouring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies: balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes, with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows or feeding out of the sugar-trough,—for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,—from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug, citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had, in former days, resembled theSedes Exploratoriaof the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him, as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother.When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it, but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.——Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar—petitions for church-livings. He took the Address-calendar, and for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.—It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen that for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,—this nothing but your money can do,—but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[42]stands in the place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.[42]Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.Towards evening—it was Sunday—he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant, who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, tothou[43]him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this: some three-and-forty years ago,a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and—what was not to be replaced—the church-records. (For this reason, it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been thrashing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the Schoolboys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men, about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humour. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle: it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned theIrregular Verbswith Thiennette.[43]In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by thethirdperson: plural, it indicates respect; singular, command: thesecondperson is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt.Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wildBurschen(Students) many a duel (happily, however, often ending like thePolemo-Midiniainonedrop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of sayingDu(thou) andSie(they) in the wrong place.—Ed.These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was coloured as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life), an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little.He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlid, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now,without farther exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.——Thus does there lurk, in the smallesthomunculus, the model of—the Catholic Church.So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.—I, for the second time, close a Chapter of thisLife, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep.THIRD LETTER-BOX.Christmas Recollections. New Occurrence.For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum: this has only one singletone, but variety oftimegives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on in the usual monotonous fashion—all the time from the Holidays—till Christmas-eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon theHamburg Political Journal, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks: while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones.Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favour of this journal; but also the circumstance that it—cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact, thathe, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of waste-paper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons: indeed I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Museà belles fesses), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.—On many things a man puts apretium affectionis, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them: on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.—I return to the Christmas-eve.At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and bakers were at fisty-cuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes), and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost, with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir-wood into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand—with the left he was holding his pipe—proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,—to writing the Class-prodromus of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I hold thefirst printingin the history of a literary man to be more important than thefirst printingin the history of Letters: Fixlein could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing, in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake of printing than of use, he farther inserted three or four pedagogic glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster colleagues as a body.He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts together; and then laid aside theOpus, and would nolonger look at it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a sigh: he too was in print, as well as I am.The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands, hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of his cue.—He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening, to recreate himself; and across the magic vapour of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke, the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows, and illuminated trees in the neighbourhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas-eve from the very dawn, as I had it of old."At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf, with which the Christ-child[44]has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.—On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden calves, and golden Pythagoras'-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.—Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes: for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and, in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and day-light come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.—I nowisegrudge J. J. Rousseau hisFlora Petrinsularis;[45]but let him also allow our Quintus hisWindow-flora.—There was no such thing as school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Butcher (his brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother, at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their stalled-beast—so they called the sparrow—under a window-sill in the Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings, nor potted meat.—About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbours have to call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk, our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table: then as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his brother: "Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.[44]These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equalgustoin another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones, to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit, of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c. &c. are specified with the same fidelity as here.—Ed.[45]Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the Bienne Lake.About eight o'clock,—here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his letter-drawer,—both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing, and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night!—What tumult of dreaming hopes!—The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air, church-music of the morning worship.Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings which then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the chambers of our hearts; and which yet, in the moonlight of memory, with its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it, that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes: but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!At last came rapid lights from the neighbourhood playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit-perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-coloured grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.———On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got—the Conrectorship, and a table-clock.FOURTH LETTER-BOX.Office-brokage. Discovery of the promised Secret. Hans van Füchslein.For while the Quintus, in his vapoury chamber, was thus running over the sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer, entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sickbed-exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted,first, of a table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hours struck, and drumming along with every stroke;secondly, of the Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here, than in theReichsanzeiger, orImperial Indicator.—I have already mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade in Hamburg candles; and the then Bürgermeister in coffee-beans, which he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of Flachsenfingen: the other members of the Council acting only as bale-wrappers, shopmenand accountants in the Council wareroom. A Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of office-trading from that principle of the Roman law:Cui jus est donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est, that is to say, He who has the right of giving anything away, has also a right to dispose of it for money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of course.Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[46]of the State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the commonweal must suffer in the long-run, if important posts are distributed, not according to the current cash, which is laid down for them, but according to connexions, relationships, party recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction, to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should not one rather expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by thealterum tantumthan the mere titulary Hofrath?—Money, among European nations, is now the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and consequently in understanding; the rather as aheadis stamped on it: to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more nor less than to stand anexamen rigorosum, which is held by a goodschema examinandi. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates andmonnoie de confiance, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers inGulliver's Travels, who, for social converse, instead of names of things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed, plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.[46]Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in Vienna: in their very names these Vienna people show taste.From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that often when I used to read that the King of France was devising new offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least calmly propose; not vexing my heart whetherGovernments choose to adopt it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could not we at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonising with the offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not, for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever: the scholastic Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating;" the King wrote himself "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c. might be conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe, few Advocates would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If, however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this reflex morality, Government should not constrain him.It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes; according to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names exert an influence on men, appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous animals,the foam so often hardens into shell: but such internal morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the fine arts, it is not this, but therepresentationof it, which forms her true aim.I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit, Sincerity and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some well-disposed minister of state to appoint aVirtue-board or Moral Address Department, with some half dozen secretaries, who, for a small salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue, and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted—their subdivision I mean;—our country Judges might then be selected for this purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins. This is a precious moralRolfinkenism, which our Jurists have learned from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin into a venial!—School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic certainly; yet still they are monarchies,—school-monarchies, to wit,—resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say, arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring the young of the community a HamelnRat-and-Child-catcher; or a Weisse'sChild's-friend,—this to the Council can make no difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State, except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our Commission of Inspectors when they go examining schools, that they do not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see what is in him.End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a quite mad notion: they believed, the Quintus would very soon die.—And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look: now, however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open, nay hang a reverberating-lamp over it.In medical history, it is a well-known fact that in certain families the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire, I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second year, took to bed and died: every one of my readers would do well to insert in his copy of theThirty-Years War, Schiller having entirely omitted it, the fact, that in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is rather to be questioned."But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing: the only thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account. He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died: First, because three Gipsies, in three different places and at three different times, had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror. Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties. Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet, and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and with them the certainty of his age, he could neverfall into a right definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty: "however," said he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always inHiskeeping? And were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life of my brother should be added to mine?"—Thus, under the cold snow of the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of it a fair snow-man.The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion; and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves, that he would soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Füchslein; but he wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow weather another year, 'tis more than I expect," said Hans.This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a Hanoverian Postboy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus, whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone bore a grudge; simply becauseFixleindid not write himselfFüchslein, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage; and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train: "He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind him of it." The mild compliant Quintus never noticed this large wasp-poisonbag in the Subrector, but took it for a honeybag; nay, by his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The Quintus, in his simplicity, took Füchslein's contempt for envy of his pedagogic talents.A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof and Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispensewith (if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas-eve he walks about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for nothing but—daylight: joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like sparrows, his sleep-grains; and tonight, moreover, the registrator of his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which, accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.On Christmas-morn, he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish inflation about his Quintusship: "the Quintus-post," said he to himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at present, I had more reason." Today he ate, as on all Sundays and holydays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To this man, Fixlein was, what common people arealways, but polished philosophical and sentimental people veryseldomare,—thankful: a man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person. Meister Steinberger, in the character of store-master, had introduced into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread andSauerkraut. Money indeed was never to be wrung from him: it is well known that he often sent the best calfskins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.—On Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the armchair; silver implements, and a wine-stoup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a Flesher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you are made that, it is well.—Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all instalment-dues to his ward, at an interest of four and a half per cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement to the Quintusship: of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on the day of payment, the Quintus always gotsome abatement; being wont every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in arithmetic, writing and geography. Steinberger with justice required of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns, where he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready, so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility. The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and assignee of her heart. The old Flesher—simply because his wife was dead—had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long ago observed—what the Quintus never did—that she had a mind for the said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their joys: today at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become unusuallyred.When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get her; butwehave done with one another: for a learned man needs quite another sort of thing.""Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein (for this post Steinberger filled in the provincial Militia), "such a match were far too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,—at the same time taking down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and suspend his slain calves: "Stop!—Hark, dost wish the present Herr Conrector here for thy husband?""Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva."Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flesher; "with this crook, thy father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed the keenlier.Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is withdebts, as with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those are the best, which can be expressed in the smallest numbers. Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his arm: for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with their debts—this notion he named stuff and oldwifery; he was neither superstitious nor fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vapouring man of letters, or your empty dainty man of rank.As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life, embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting and burnishing for the reader,—I must now travel on with the stream of his history to Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous: do but consider that Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his thirty-third year.From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector. The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his Quintus-ashes, a young Phœnix combined itself together. Great changes—in offices, marriages, travels—make us younger; we always date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has never been aught else except a—crown-prince.FIFTH LETTER-BOX.Cantata-Sunday. Two Testaments. Pontac; Blood; Love.The Spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the beginning of whose Spring is fullof tears. But, on the other hand, this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by blossoms than by snow.In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing of funereal peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last: it is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic thrice.Men are apt to postpone theirlastwill as long as theirbetterone: the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not Thiennette, during the last night, before from sick-nurse she became corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and of his meagre hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future, where, like a drooping yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the schoolroom between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears were the fluid tints with which she coloured her picture. As the Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependents, and as she began with the male ones, Fixlein stood at the top; and Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not lift his scythe and give the last stroke till his protegee had been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all away, life, testament and hopes.When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home. Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the gorgeoussorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral Shadow of this whole Earth: but it was the woe of a child, of a mother, whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any more!"—And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed, over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.—To the now Conrector Egidius Zebedäus was left:In the first place, a large sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and by approach nearer, to examine it;secondly, there was devised to him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived, one ducat;thirdly, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded the mother, "what the poor Fräulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand which was just stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy, and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near door-neighbours that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell, where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do with.The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off—without so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which layhis emotion—up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had afemalepredilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which, by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend; and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story above ground. Nazianzen informs us (Orat. XVI.) that the Jews, in old times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a flea would have measured it not in Diameters of the Earth, but in Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section, he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim about, for one half hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass: he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence, his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was: but against thisvenia ætatis, she saw too well, the authorities would have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could not but be presumed that he then was."And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called, and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the voyage of his life: Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the bestlawsuits thrown to the dogs: seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled—for, in the first place, there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet thirty-two[47]—from such a lock, might not only silk and hanging-cords, but whole dragnets have been spun and twisted. Clients in general would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted longer: Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of law are not to blame for this: on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of Truth, that not thefindingbut theseekingof it profits men, and that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in return for the sweet labour of investigation, so is the professor of Law not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a juridical truth,—which is called pleading and practising,—and he would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can subsist as an honourable man with wife and child, let such approximation be as tedious as it likes.
[38]As in the State.—V. or Von,de,of, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.—Ed.
[38]As in the State.—V. or Von,de,of, being the symbol of the nobility, the middle order of the State.—Ed.
I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our Reviewers would publicly let me know, if on a more accurate summation they find this number incorrect.[39]
[39]In Erlang, my petition has been granted. TheBible Institutionof that town have found instead of the 116,301 A's, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. SeeLüdeke's Beschr. des Türk. Reichs(Lüdeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).
[39]In Erlang, my petition has been granted. TheBible Institutionof that town have found instead of the 116,301 A's, which Fixlein at first pretended with such certainty to find in the Bible-books (which false number was accordingly given in the first Edition of this Work, p. 81), the above-mentioned 323,015; which (uncommonly singular) is precisely the sum of all the letters in the Koran put together. SeeLüdeke's Beschr. des Türk. Reichs(Lüdeke's Description of the Turkish Empire. New edition, 1780).
Much also did the Quintuscollect: he had a fineAlmanac Collection, aCatechismandPamphlet Collection; also aCollection of Advertisements, which he began, is not so incomplete as you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on hisAlphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books, where my name also occurs among the J's.
But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly, he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were sons of wh—, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates the Learned whomeantto write something; and Ancillon those who wrote nothing at all; and the Lübeck Superintendent Götze, those who were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a few: for example, of the Learned, who were unlearned; of those who were entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,—of cue-preachers, cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers; of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,—in their twentieth—twenty-first, &c.,—in their hundred and fiftieth, of which he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned (whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as his hands[40]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus and Timotheus[41]).
[40]Paravicini Singularia de viris claris. Cent. I. 2.
[40]Paravicini Singularia de viris claris. Cent. I. 2.
[41]Ejusd. Cent. II.Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about the quantity of a syllable: the prize or bet was the beard of the vanquished. Timotheus lost his.
[41]Ejusd. Cent. II.Philelphus quarrelled with the Greek about the quantity of a syllable: the prize or bet was the beard of the vanquished. Timotheus lost his.
Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labours: but I think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad; it compares the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles Lettres at the expense of his jog-trot officialities, toconcert-clocks, which,though striking their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross stupidsteeple-clocks.
To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions, bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling-trees; and returned not again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a Biographer must not omit: for his mother had, by request, been wont to map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past, he committed to certain little leaves, which merit our undivided attention. For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separateletter-boxes. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c. of his twenty-first year, and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
And here must I in reference to those reviewing Mutes, who may be for casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was, and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian bowels.
But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother: this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial endowment, dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves. It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.—O good mother, rather thank God for it!—
After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigour for his desk,he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it is regularlittleforms, such as those of balls and dies, that impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse, in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of potato-plums, in the cheerful glass-house of a cube-shaped lantern, and other the like products of his early architecture. The following, however, I explain quite differently: he had ventured, without leave given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass windows, and a red coat of colouring, and very many alcoves, and three balconies: balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well, where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be built. From the glistening eyes, with which the architect had viewed his tenantry creeping about the windows or feeding out of the sugar-trough,—for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but sugar,—from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls, and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug, citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool, which had, in former days, resembled theSedes Exploratoriaof the Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children should not so delight him, as the emblems of these sports, when the child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his presence.
Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and which had belonged to his poor drowned brother.When the boy with the key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence. Most probably there is nothing in it, but the poor soul's playthings. Let us look away from this bloody urn.——
Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome medicinal things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar—petitions for church-livings. He took the Address-calendar, and for every country parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For Hukelum alone he did not solicit.—It is a pretty custom in Flachsenfingen that for every office which is vacant, you are required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get the office,—this nothing but your money can do,—but that you may learn to write petitions. In truth, if among the Calmucks, the turning of a calabash[42]stands in the place of Prayer, a slight movement of the purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
[42]Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.
[42]Their prayer-barrel, Kürüdu, is a hollowed shell, a calabash, full of unrolled formulas of prayer; they sway it from side to side, and then it works. More philosophically viewed, since in prayer the feeling only is of consequence, it is much the same whether this express itself by motion of the mouth or of the calabash.
Towards evening—it was Sunday—he went out roving over the village; he pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant, who, from school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, tothou[43]him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal understands, till I explain it. The case was this: some three-and-forty years ago,a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the parsonage, and—what was not to be replaced—the church-records. (For this reason, it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.) In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly there had been thrashing; and the seed of the divine word to be turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The Chanter and the Schoolboys took up the threshing-floor; the female mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically, like groschen and farthing-gallery men, about the barn-stairs; and far up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not without humour. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle: it was here, accordingly, that Fixlein had learned theIrregular Verbswith Thiennette.
[43]In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by thethirdperson: plural, it indicates respect; singular, command: thesecondperson is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt.Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wildBurschen(Students) many a duel (happily, however, often ending like thePolemo-Midiniainonedrop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of sayingDu(thou) andSie(they) in the wrong place.—Ed.
[43]In German, as in some other languages, the common mode of address is by thethirdperson: plural, it indicates respect; singular, command: thesecondperson is also used; plural, it generally denotes indifference; singular, great familiarity, and sometimes its product, contempt.Dutzenfreund, Thouing-friend, is the strictest term of intimacy; and among the wildBurschen(Students) many a duel (happily, however, often ending like thePolemo-Midiniainonedrop of blood) has been fought, in consequence of sayingDu(thou) andSie(they) in the wrong place.—Ed.
These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still, after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute. Every dew-drop was coloured as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness; every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of separation (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of Life), an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a little.
He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to go over, under his coverlid, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was already over with his evening supplication; and could now,without farther exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.——Thus does there lurk, in the smallesthomunculus, the model of—the Catholic Church.
So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedäus Egidius Fixlein.—I, for the second time, close a Chapter of thisLife, as Life itself is closed, with a sleep.
Christmas Recollections. New Occurrence.
For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus, you regard your existence as a drum: this has only one singletone, but variety oftimegives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at his desk by night; and so lived on in the usual monotonous fashion—all the time from the Holidays—till Christmas-eve, 1791; and nothing was remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to paint.
But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place, explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar away over the dim cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon theHamburg Political Journal, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks: while to the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French, were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them with new ones.
Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess him in favour of this journal; but also the circumstance that it—cost him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not this throw light on the fact, thathe, as Morhof advised, was wont sedulously to collect the separate leaves of waste-paper books as they came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these aprons: indeed I am willing to believe that a good version of more than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our Literature (this Museà belles fesses), and serve her in place of drivel-bib.—On many things a man puts apretium affectionis, simply because he hopes he may have half stolen them: on this principle, combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he rigorously examined.—I return to the Christmas-eve.
At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and bakers were at fisty-cuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes), and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost, with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir-wood into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand—with the left he was holding his pipe—proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,—to writing the Class-prodromus of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I hold thefirst printingin the history of a literary man to be more important than thefirst printingin the history of Letters: Fixlein could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing, in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake of printing than of use, he farther inserted three or four pedagogic glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster colleagues as a body.
He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts together; and then laid aside theOpus, and would nolonger look at it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a sigh: he too was in print, as well as I am.
The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands, hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of his cue.—He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening, to recreate himself; and across the magic vapour of his pipe, like a new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke, the long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows, and illuminated trees in the neighbourhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood, uncovered, fresh, green and balmy, standing afar off before him. From his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the whole Christmas-eve from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from the gold-leaf and silver-leaf, with which the Christ-child[44]has been emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the night.—On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier than the golden calves, and golden Pythagoras'-legs, and golden Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.—Then came his mother, bringing him both Christianity and clothes: for in drawing on his trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and, in tying his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over, and day-light come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.—I nowisegrudge J. J. Rousseau hisFlora Petrinsularis;[45]but let him also allow our Quintus hisWindow-flora.—There was no such thing as school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Butcher (his brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother, at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their stalled-beast—so they called the sparrow—under a window-sill in the Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings, nor potted meat.—About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbours have to call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk, our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table: then as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the unexpected present, and says to his brother: "Look what the good Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the whole evening.
[44]These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equalgustoin another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones, to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit, of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c. &c. are specified with the same fidelity as here.—Ed.
[44]These antique Christmas festivities Richter describes with equalgustoin another work (Briefe und Zukünftige Lebenslemf); where the Christ-child (falsely reported to the young ones, to have been seen flying through the air, with gold wings); the Birch-bough fixed in a corner of the room, and by him made to grow; the fruit, of gilt sweetmeats, apples, nuts, which (for good boys) it suddenly produces, &c. &c. are specified with the same fidelity as here.—Ed.
[45]Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the Bienne Lake.
[45]Which he purposed to make for his Island of St. Pierre in the Bienne Lake.
About eight o'clock,—here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his letter-drawer,—both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing, and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night!—What tumult of dreaming hopes!—The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air, church-music of the morning worship.
Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings which then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the chambers of our hearts; and which yet, in the moonlight of memory, with its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it, that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes: but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
At last came rapid lights from the neighbourhood playing through the window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit-perfume of the still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-coloured grove on the wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of Eden.——
—On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got—the Conrectorship, and a table-clock.
Office-brokage. Discovery of the promised Secret. Hans van Füchslein.
For while the Quintus, in his vapoury chamber, was thus running over the sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer, entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sickbed-exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted,first, of a table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hours struck, and drumming along with every stroke;secondly, of the Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.
As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here, than in theReichsanzeiger, orImperial Indicator.—I have already mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade in Hamburg candles; and the then Bürgermeister in coffee-beans, which he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of Flachsenfingen: the other members of the Council acting only as bale-wrappers, shopmenand accountants in the Council wareroom. A Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of office-trading from that principle of the Roman law:Cui jus est donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est, that is to say, He who has the right of giving anything away, has also a right to dispose of it for money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of course.
Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.
My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[46]of the State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the commonweal must suffer in the long-run, if important posts are distributed, not according to the current cash, which is laid down for them, but according to connexions, relationships, party recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction, to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should not one rather expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by thealterum tantumthan the mere titulary Hofrath?—Money, among European nations, is now the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and consequently in understanding; the rather as aheadis stamped on it: to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more nor less than to stand anexamen rigorosum, which is held by a goodschema examinandi. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates andmonnoie de confiance, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers inGulliver's Travels, who, for social converse, instead of names of things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed, plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.
[46]Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in Vienna: in their very names these Vienna people show taste.
[46]Borrowed from the "Imperial Mine-product-sale-Commission," in Vienna: in their very names these Vienna people show taste.
From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that often when I used to read that the King of France was devising new offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least calmly propose; not vexing my heart whetherGovernments choose to adopt it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could not we at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonising with the offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not, for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever: the scholastic Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating;" the King wrote himself "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c. might be conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe, few Advocates would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If, however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this reflex morality, Government should not constrain him.
It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes; according to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names exert an influence on men, appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous animals,the foam so often hardens into shell: but such internal morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the fine arts, it is not this, but therepresentationof it, which forms her true aim.
I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit, Sincerity and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some well-disposed minister of state to appoint aVirtue-board or Moral Address Department, with some half dozen secretaries, who, for a small salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue, and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted—their subdivision I mean;—our country Judges might then be selected for this purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins. This is a precious moralRolfinkenism, which our Jurists have learned from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin into a venial!—
School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic certainly; yet still they are monarchies,—school-monarchies, to wit,—resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say, arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring the young of the community a HamelnRat-and-Child-catcher; or a Weisse'sChild's-friend,—this to the Council can make no difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State, except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our Commission of Inspectors when they go examining schools, that they do not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see what is in him.
End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general.
Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a quite mad notion: they believed, the Quintus would very soon die.
—And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look: now, however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open, nay hang a reverberating-lamp over it.
In medical history, it is a well-known fact that in certain families the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire, I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second year, took to bed and died: every one of my readers would do well to insert in his copy of theThirty-Years War, Schiller having entirely omitted it, the fact, that in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is rather to be questioned."
But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing: the only thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account. He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died: First, because three Gipsies, in three different places and at three different times, had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror. Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties. Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet, and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and with them the certainty of his age, he could neverfall into a right definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty: "however," said he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always inHiskeeping? And were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life of my brother should be added to mine?"—Thus, under the cold snow of the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of it a fair snow-man.
The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion; and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves, that he would soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Füchslein; but he wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow weather another year, 'tis more than I expect," said Hans.
This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a Hanoverian Postboy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus, whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone bore a grudge; simply becauseFixleindid not write himselfFüchslein, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage; and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train: "He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind him of it." The mild compliant Quintus never noticed this large wasp-poisonbag in the Subrector, but took it for a honeybag; nay, by his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The Quintus, in his simplicity, took Füchslein's contempt for envy of his pedagogic talents.
A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof and Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispensewith (if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas-eve he walks about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for nothing but—daylight: joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like sparrows, his sleep-grains; and tonight, moreover, the registrator of his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which, accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
On Christmas-morn, he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish inflation about his Quintusship: "the Quintus-post," said he to himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at present, I had more reason." Today he ate, as on all Sundays and holydays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To this man, Fixlein was, what common people arealways, but polished philosophical and sentimental people veryseldomare,—thankful: a man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person. Meister Steinberger, in the character of store-master, had introduced into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread andSauerkraut. Money indeed was never to be wrung from him: it is well known that he often sent the best calfskins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.—On Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the armchair; silver implements, and a wine-stoup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a Flesher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you are made that, it is well.—Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all instalment-dues to his ward, at an interest of four and a half per cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement to the Quintusship: of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on the day of payment, the Quintus always gotsome abatement; being wont every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in arithmetic, writing and geography. Steinberger with justice required of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns, where he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready, so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility. The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and assignee of her heart. The old Flesher—simply because his wife was dead—had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long ago observed—what the Quintus never did—that she had a mind for the said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their joys: today at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become unusuallyred.
When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get her; butwehave done with one another: for a learned man needs quite another sort of thing."
"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein (for this post Steinberger filled in the provincial Militia), "such a match were far too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,—at the same time taking down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and suspend his slain calves: "Stop!—Hark, dost wish the present Herr Conrector here for thy husband?"
"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flesher; "with this crook, thy father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed the keenlier.
Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is withdebts, as with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those are the best, which can be expressed in the smallest numbers. Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his arm: for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with their debts—this notion he named stuff and oldwifery; he was neither superstitious nor fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vapouring man of letters, or your empty dainty man of rank.
As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life, embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting and burnishing for the reader,—I must now travel on with the stream of his history to Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous: do but consider that Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his thirty-third year.
From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector. The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his Quintus-ashes, a young Phœnix combined itself together. Great changes—in offices, marriages, travels—make us younger; we always date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has never been aught else except a—crown-prince.
Cantata-Sunday. Two Testaments. Pontac; Blood; Love.
The Spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the beginning of whose Spring is fullof tears. But, on the other hand, this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by blossoms than by snow.
In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing of funereal peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last: it is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic thrice.
Men are apt to postpone theirlastwill as long as theirbetterone: the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not Thiennette, during the last night, before from sick-nurse she became corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and of his meagre hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future, where, like a drooping yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the schoolroom between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears were the fluid tints with which she coloured her picture. As the Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependents, and as she began with the male ones, Fixlein stood at the top; and Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not lift his scythe and give the last stroke till his protegee had been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all away, life, testament and hopes.
When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home. Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the gorgeoussorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral Shadow of this whole Earth: but it was the woe of a child, of a mother, whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any more!"—And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable of sketching some plans for the future employment of his legacy.
Four weeks after, to wit, on the 5th of May, the testament was unsealed; but not till the 6th (Cantata-Sunday) did he go down to Hukelum. His mother met his salutations with tears; which she shed, over the corpse for grief, over the testament for joy.—To the now Conrector Egidius Zebedäus was left:In the first place, a large sumptuous bed, with a mirror-tester, in which the giant Goliath might have rolled at his ease, and to which I and my fair readers will by and by approach nearer, to examine it;secondly, there was devised to him, as unpaid Easter-godchild-money, for every year that he had lived, one ducat;thirdly, all the admittance and instalment dues, which his elevation to the Quintate and Conrectorate had cost him, were to be made good to the utmost penny. "And dost thou know, then," proceeded the mother, "what the poor Fräulein has got? Ah Heaven! Nothing! Not one brass farthing!" For Death had stiffened the hand which was just stretching itself out to reach the poor Thiennette a little rain-screen against the foul weather of life. The mother related this perverse trick of Fortune with true condolence; which in women dissipates envy, and comes easier to them than congratulation, a feeling belonging rather to men. In many female hearts sympathy and envy are such near door-neighbours that they could be virtuous nowhere except in Hell, where men have such frightful times of it; and vicious nowhere except in Heaven, where people have more happiness than they know what to do with.
The Conrector was now enjoying on Earth that Heaven to which his benefactress had ascended. First of all, he started off—without so much as putting up his handkerchief, in which layhis emotion—up-stairs to see the legacy-bed unshrouded; for he had afemalepredilection for furniture. I know not whether the reader ever looked at or mounted any of these ancient chivalric beds, into which, by means of a little stair without balustrades, you can easily ascend; and in which you, properly speaking, sleep always at least one story above ground. Nazianzen informs us (Orat. XVI.) that the Jews, in old times, had high beds with cock-ladders of this sort; but simply because of vermin. The legacy bed-Ark was quite as large as one of these; and a flea would have measured it not in Diameters of the Earth, but in Distances of Sirius. When Fixlein beheld this colossal dormitory, with the curtains drawn asunder, and its canopy of looking-glass, he could have longed to be in it; and had it been in his power to cut from the opaque hemisphere of Night, at that time in America, a small section, he would have established himself there along with it, just to swim about, for one half hour, with his thin lath figure, in this sea of down. The mother, by longer chains of reasoning and chains of calculation than the bed was, had not succeeded in persuading him to have the broad mirror on the top cut in pieces, though his large dressing-table had nothing to see itself in but a mere shaving-glass: he let the mirror lie where it was for this reason: "Should I ever, God willing, get married," said he, "I shall then, towards morning, be able to look at my sleeping wife, without sitting up in bed."
As to the second article of the testament, the godchild Easter-pence, his mother had, last night, arranged it perfectly. The Lawyer took her evidence on the years of the heir; and these she had stated at exactly the teeth-number, two-and-thirty. She would willingly have lied, and passed off her son, like an Inscription, for older than he was: but against thisvenia ætatis, she saw too well, the authorities would have taken exception, "that it was falsehood and cozenage; had the son been two-and-thirty, he must have been dead some time ago, as it could not but be presumed that he then was."
And just as she was recounting this, a servant from Schadeck called, and delivered to the Conrector, in return for a discharge and ratification of the birth-certificate given out by his mother, a gold bar of two-and-thirty ducat age-counters, like a helm-bar for the voyage of his life: Herr von Aufhammer was too proud to engage in any pettifogging discussion over a plebeian birth-certificate.
And thus, by a proud open-handedness, was one of the bestlawsuits thrown to the dogs: seeing this gold bar might, in the wire-mill of the judgment-bench, have been drawn out into the finest threads. From such a tangled lock, which was not to be unravelled—for, in the first place, there was no document to prove Fixlein's age; in the second place, so long as he lived, the necessary conclusion was, that he was not yet thirty-two[47]—from such a lock, might not only silk and hanging-cords, but whole dragnets have been spun and twisted. Clients in general would have less reason to complain of their causes, if these lasted longer: Philosophers contend for thousands of years over philosophical questions; and it seems an unaccountable thing, therefore, that Advocates should attempt to end their juristical questions in a space of eighty, or even sometimes of sixty years. But the professors of law are not to blame for this: on the other hand, as Lessing asserts of Truth, that not thefindingbut theseekingof it profits men, and that he himself would willingly make over his claim to all truths in return for the sweet labour of investigation, so is the professor of Law not profited by the finding and deciding, but by the investigation of a juridical truth,—which is called pleading and practising,—and he would willingly consent to approximate to Truth forever, like an hyperbola to its asymptote, without ever meeting it, seeing he can subsist as an honourable man with wife and child, let such approximation be as tedious as it likes.