[47]As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year; it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the death of the testatrix, no farthing could he claimed by him; since, according to our notion, at the making of the testament he was not even one year old.The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a farther commission from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which, properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good to him.Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on, and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound and in good season.I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that tothe moneyed Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, today the Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his family, came in as a farther aggravation. The mother, who should have known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect how stupid I felt on Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not as the poet does, in the up-towering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book; and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into slumber in some latticed pew.—And yet he thought oftener of him than last year: for joy readily melts us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball,—for, in the physical and in the moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land,—has provided for the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us namely, a quite special elixir against spasms in the soul: I declare this same Genius must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour over his slashes and bone-breakages—gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous vertigos of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy, Christianity, Judaism, Paganism andTime;—liquor, as I said.The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three groschens of post-money, and commissioned,—for he had a whole cabinet of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark with his hand,—three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must have a Cantata merrying-making," saidhe; "if it be my last day, let it be my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question is, Whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fräulein. Had he lived in the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand, or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when, accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people bouzed up all,—he would not have spent one kreutzer more on that account. His joy was, that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man: just people, who make much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,—with the Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical scene, before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of Jerusalem, there were a special door—besides that of Death—standing open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her, occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the Prosaist a Psalmist: in sorrow alone have women courage to front opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in the garden.The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair friend, to offer his thanks,—and tonight also—his Pontac. Three Pontac decanters and three wine-glasses were placed outside on the projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every timehe returned from the dusky covered-way amid the flower-forests, he drank a little from his glass,—and the mother sipped now and then from within through the opened window.I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the south-west corner of the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched back into the village. In the north-west corner bloomed an acacia-grove, like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood. On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil of our life's lamp where he finds it shed: to him it is the red death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the flower-bushes; her hands with their knitting-ware sunk into her bosom, her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her left arm in the real bandage of blood-letting; and with cheeks to which the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings—this day's included—had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror—not at this flower's-sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance—began to unrol the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her: he was now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait on her with his ears, not with his eyes.I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the Conrector plucked up courage to—turn, to come back, and employ the resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling and calling to his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take her by the hand, and, with some medical apology, gently pull her out of sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never dream.However, he did awake her, by those other means.Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the night-air of memory is again blowing on thy nakedwounds!—And yet was the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could light on, when it sank from the hanging garden of Dreams into this lower one round thee.She herself was little conscious,—and the Conrector not at all,—that she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial body, namely towards Fixlein: she resembled an Italian flower, that contains cunningly concealed within it a newyear's gift, which the receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards her.—She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials, upon altars to be worshiped. He could very suitably preface his invitation to the Pontac festival, with a long acknowledgment of thanks for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her, or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm. One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as a sable Abbé by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He, however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down from another street.These things he cannot help. But tonight he had scarcely, with his fair faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some superstitious dread of water-sprites had lately poured the pure blood of her left arm,—when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fräulein. I aver, that, at the banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth, while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper-ball ofthe steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious, modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart, and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away.—A candle stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions; on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in reflection, the face of Thiennette.Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew, and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a shorter grating of shadow.—The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging more and more continuous in the sable of night.—The warm vapour of the wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in the night. Fixlein now led the Fräulein in his arm without scruple. By reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the provender of Love; the fingers are electric dischargers of a fire sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two teardrops, one in another's, one in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and perhaps thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the Suffering sex!And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou good sex, am representing in little figuresthe cuts and scars of thy spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new ones....Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had already told his mother, as she now told him: In the last two nights of the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once, after midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips. Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,—and only rounded her lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own, wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen and tearful she pressed her warm lips on the colder,—and she was silent like her that was to speak no more,—and she embraced alone and was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again;—she sank down on the stiffened lips—but this had been no signal, for the lips of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night, did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou, like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a sunny day: without parents art thou, without brother, without friend; here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou, left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and she is so good from the very heart—Me she has made happy—Ah, had I the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a trial.".... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with sable,—and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in an hour and a half betransformed into the boldest, and then continues so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in passing, that this was stupid: the torn vine is full of water-veins as well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt only into tears.If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.—One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors—that is to say, in the long-run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits—make men at once pious, soft and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, isforever a youth; and is, what other men are only once, namely in love,—or only after Pontac, namely intoxicated,—all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the morning, now became one at night: wine made him pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be keptmoist.He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up; and over all these vapours of life, hung motionless and flaming the thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning galaxy....It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dreadMene Mene Tekel Upharsin. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral piles, was mounting up.The whole future Crucifixion-path of his friend lay prickly and bethorned before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her foot,—she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook thisspeech for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm, tonight for the first time, pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay; the only living mortal's arm, by which Joy, Love and the Earth, were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the Whispering-gallery,[48]where the faintest breath bodies itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our poor powerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not: he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I will give you all; fortune, life and all that I have, my heart and my hand."[48]In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper sounds over across a space of 143 feet.She was about to answer, but casting a side-glance, she cried, with a shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round; and perceived the white muslin sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage was put on; he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one does, with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her afflicted life was hurrying.—When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude.—The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible softness; and the heart, lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed; as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get back their tones.—Before such a magic form, before such a pure heavenly love, her sympathising friend was melted between the flames of joy and grief;and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, on the pale angelic face, the lips of which he timidly pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last rapture of existence?... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love; for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was now for long years passed over.—Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their betrothment, from its dusk broken by white acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was new, light and young. The sky stood full of glittering dewdrops from the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.—The Moon, with her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden; and was hanging above in a starless Blue, as if she had consumed the nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a Christ's-face smiling in love of man.—Under this light they looked at one another for the first time, after the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still standing written on their faces....Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in Paradise!SIXTH LETTER-BOX.Office-impost. One of the most important of Petitions.The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!—With the inflammatory, tickling,eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling, that he had now got the introductory program of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;—with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long, he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured,—as pilgrims measure the length of their pilgrimage,—not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters, the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm billowy Life, he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother downstairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple-grass, and that yesterday she had not told him merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him,—especially as he was sober now,—when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment) into thecoolingdawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes—not indeed to meet him, but still—into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts colour to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook").—And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his lastnight's happiness, dips down into the West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.—The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a true entire Potosi of delights.In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees, and thanked God—not so much for his heritage and bride as—for his life: for he had gone away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back; and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will, than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth: one loves the Earth and those that are on it with a new love.—The Conrector could have found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who, in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a Quintaner....His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty florins cash, in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks.""Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said,payable at three months' mutual notice. How could a man like me go on, else?—However, I will change you the gold pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself a better hat, and whole shoes: "if you like," added he, "to get a calfskin and half a dozen hareskins dressed, they are lying upstairs."—I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appear before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots,or in suitable apparel.—In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.But now came two most peculiarly important papers—at bottom only one, the Petition for the Hukelum parsonship—to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay, before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open: for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up this post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he—owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work; which I cannot explain till after what follows.It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well, had he—for man is a fool from the very foundation of him—had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader: but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into schoolrooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson havenothingto pay,—even in Bayreuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such, that a Quartus—a Quartus do I say,—a Tertius—a Tertius do I say,—a Conrector, at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than:Fl. rhen.Kr. rhen.3049For taking the oaths at the Consistorium.40To the Syndic for the Presentation.20To the then Bürgermeister.457½For the Government-sanction.Total81 fl.56½ kr.If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus &c. come cheaper from the press than even a Conrector. Now it is clear that in this case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first year, he gets an overplus beyond thisdock-moneyof his office. A schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly income in the highest class. Another thing in his favour is, that our institutions do not—as those of Athens did—prohibit people from entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year under the title ofAnnates, or First Fruits; and accordingly he, in all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two-thirds of their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must naturally have an eye to vacancies.It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of Mentz, when I confess, that in Schmausen'sCorp. Jur. Pub. Germ.I have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of the 6th January 1659; and there investigated how much this same Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into aPoet Laureate, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues to pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by andex officio.—The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1000 florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the entrymoneys of theirschoolrooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase thevenia ætatiswith 200 hard florins; while with the half sum he might have become a schoolmaster, and hereagewould have come of its own accord.—And a thousand such things!—They prove, however, that matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks a Town-Syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted for mere dread of digressiveness.The Syndic—a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family—gave me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair to thebenchand theladder, on which people are laid when about to be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30 reichsthalers;[49]if he annually purchase manufactured goods, according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual, namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundredweights of victual than these assume, namely 10; in short, if he live like a substantial wood-cutter,—then the Devil must be in it, if he cannot yearly lay by so much net profit, as shall, in the long-run, pay the interest of his entry-debts."[49]So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly requires in Germany.The Syndic must have failed to convince me at the time, since I afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[50]"Illustrious Sir, you know not, but I do—not a player in your Theatre would act the Schoolmaster in Engel'sProdigal Son, three nights running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for acting it all the days of the year.—In Prussia, Invalids are made Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made Invalids."...[50]This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be excused by the equally singular relation, wherein the Biographer stands to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold here, were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title ofDog-post-days, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair 1795, I hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of hisCrown-debts; but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also, and the grove of betrothment,—this was an open gate into a New Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed. For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby scarcely the purchase-money of a—purse was to be come at; in this way he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial-torch than for his bridal one.For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered States, as little permitted to marry as the Soldiery. InConringius de Antiquitutibus Academicis, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now cloisters, and consequently we endeavour to maintain in our teachers at least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows. The vow of Obedience might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors; but the second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to, that no man who has made it needs any farthertestimonium paupertatis;—and nowletthis man, if he likes, lay hold of a matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer!...I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the annexed wedding-mansion: for they see clearly enough, that directly thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came from such a repository.Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking: it submitted to the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the parish: his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service; therefore he prayed," &c.2. "The here-documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten testament secured him, he himself could clear, incase he obtained the living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &c.Voluntary Note by me.It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather, whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader, blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine. Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons, by whom not indeed the church and churchyard—though these things are articles of commerce in England—so much as the true management of them had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know from Lange,[51]that the Church must support its patron, when he has nothing to live upon: and might not a nobleman, before he actually began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?—[51]HisClerical Law, p. 551.3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fräulein von Thiennette, and given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed the said Fräulein were he once provided for," &c.Voluntary Note by me.I hold this ground to be the strongest in the whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten and full of millepedes: she was his Œconoma, his Castle-Stewardess and Legatessa Laterefor his domestics; and with her pretensions for an alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."My Voluntary Note.The dog then, it seems, to which thenobleman has hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name asecondtime from him!—But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church, how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies deeper: not the contractedsituation, but the contractedeye, not a favourite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic, a soul that cannotmeasureandseparatetheconcentriccircles of human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all——In short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.The Conrector wrote out his petition splendidly in five propitious evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some months, if Scioppius' word is to be taken; still less so long as another scholar at a Latin epistle, who—truly we have nothing but Morhof's word for it—hatched it during four whole months; inserting his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases, accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more thorough-going genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after-life.Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel, if he get the parsonage: can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as, according to Möser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they made in theforenoon(in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),—so the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly happen, as at those hours they are—sleeping.SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.Sermon. School-Exhibition. Splendid Mistake.The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreutzers, one halfpenny Frankish; but no answer: the dog remained without name, his master without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidatebreeding-pond, and thrown him into thefeeding-pondof the Hukelum parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty dyers', buttonmakers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess, or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the Peerage, while still a fœtus, may with more propriety be likened to thespinner, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's womb.—But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him, that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still thirty-five florins left to himself, asallodiumand pocket-money, wherewith he might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means: Every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random, two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too, when on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these funds from among his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy, having offered it as bounty-money, and luck-penny to the patron, this false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church-doorwould certainly have vexed him; but now if he had missed the knocker, he had the luck-penny again, and could be merry.I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native village, with a brief transitory notice.In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing; and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday before all the peasants, who had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; farther, before his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her satin muff; farther, before his Lordship, whom he can positively command to be blessed; and finally, before his muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same lips can both kiss and preach: in my opinion, I say, when a man effects all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would paint his situation, that he—hold his jaw; and of the reader who would sympathise with it, that he open his, and preach himself.——But what I mustex officiodepict, is the day to which this Sunday was but the prelude, the vigil and the whet; I mean the prelude, the vigil and the whet to theMartini Actus, orMartinmas Exhibition, of his school. On Sunday was the Sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the universe.I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or theopera seriaof a Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who have been at schools, and who know how the school-drama of an Actus, and the stage-manager, andthe playbill (the Program) thereof are to be estimated, still without overrating their importance.Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of theMartini Actus, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording the Conrector's Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, Whether in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectiousbarbarisms? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also our Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question: Whether the Romans, when they taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than in this same? Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what follows, in his own words:"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation, the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children, grandchildren and children's children, down to our own times, of this great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured, with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, withthe Advocate Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in 1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject: however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to, on the 14th of November, from the mouths of sis well-conditioned perorators. In the first place, shall"Gottlieb Spiesglass, a Flachsenfinger, endeavour to show, in a Latin oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the Luther family. After him strives"Friedrich Christian Krabbler, from Hukelum, in German prose, to appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will"Daniel Lorenz Stenzingerdeliver, in Latin verse, an account of Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give opportunity to"Nikol Tobias Pfizmanto come forward in French, and recount the most important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years, university-life and riper age. And now, when"Andreas Eintarmshall have endeavoured, in German verse, to apologise for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther, will"Justus Strobel, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons of the Flachsenfingen School, and then farther bring forward those portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know absolutely nothing, they being sparedDeo volentefor the speakers of the nextMartini Actus."The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could not be present at the great school-festival, especiallyladies, made their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but on the other hand I am equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with his triumphal chariot and six—to call the six brethren-speakers coach-horses—next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor gentlemen. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today'sOvation, which is leading on tomorrow'sTriumph: on thy dissolving countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday clothes humbly to place herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen, and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things and understand them too;—or the son, who, like some of the heroes of Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the late Burchardt Grossmann, who under the initial letters of the stanzas in his song, "Brich an, du liebe Morgenröthe," inserted the letters of his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herbwoman for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making herself one-twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man as wise—though indeed as very clever and pedantic—who can fret his gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World (so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe, the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree and Life-tree, and the dew-drops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths and night-moths, fall universally into the same error, only on different leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which the schoolmaster issues hisprograms, the dramaturgist his playbills, the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,—does it, if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his ownsimilarfolly; and laughs in regard to his neighbour, at nothing but mankind and himself.The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to Hukelum, to give the Fräulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this glorious business.—And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus itself as shall be single of its kind.But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.——It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum Presentation for the SubrectorFüchslein in his pocket. To the last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage: but he had distinguished ill betwixtSubandConrector; and had besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for he thought: "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our Fräulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats already?" That his Lordship could pass over his own godson, never entered the man's head.Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the ParsonFixleinof Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own: and finding moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but only of aSchul-unter-befehlslaberor School-undergovernor (instead of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error. Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector—we two, the reader and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful saltations—on his gratefully-streaming eyes—on his full hands so laden with bounty—on the present of two ducats, which he drops into the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister), or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over,though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning, shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined on the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus, though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to call this evening in passing at his mother's, and give her a lecture for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive today.The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical—and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters and with coloured ink, as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except in ornamental letters and when newly washed;[52]—and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus—for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling,—he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.
[47]As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year; it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the death of the testatrix, no farthing could he claimed by him; since, according to our notion, at the making of the testament he was not even one year old.
[47]As, by the evidence at present before us, we can found on no other presumption, than that he must die in his thirty-second year; it would follow, that, in case he died two-and-thirty years after the death of the testatrix, no farthing could he claimed by him; since, according to our notion, at the making of the testament he was not even one year old.
The Schadeck servant had, besides the gold legacy, a farther commission from the Lawyer, whereby the testamentary heir was directed to sum up the mint-dues which he had been obliged to pay while lying under the coining-press of his superiors, as Quintus and Conrector; the which, properly documented and authenticated, were forthwith to be made good to him.
Our Conrector, who now rated himself among the great capitalists of the world, held his short gold-roll like a sceptre in his hand; like a basket-net lifted from the sea of the Future, which was now to run on, and bring him all manner of fed-fishes, well-washed, sound and in good season.
I cannot relate all things at once; else I should ere now have told the reader, who must long have been waiting for it, that tothe moneyed Conrector his two-and-thirty godchild-pennies but too much prefigured the two-and-thirty years of his age; besides which, today the Cantata-Sunday, this Bartholomew-night and Second of September of his family, came in as a farther aggravation. The mother, who should have known the age of her child, said she had forgotten it; but durst wager he was thirty-two a year ago; only the Lawyer was a man you could not speak to. "I could swear it myself," said the capitalist; "I recollect how stupid I felt on Cantata-Sunday last year." Fixlein beheld Death, not as the poet does, in the up-towering, asunder-driving concave-mirror of Imagination; but as the child, as the savage, as the peasant, as the woman does, in the plane octavo-mirror on the board of a Prayer-book; and Death looked to him like an old white-headed man, sunk down into slumber in some latticed pew.—
And yet he thought oftener of him than last year: for joy readily melts us into softness; and the lackered Wheel of Fortune is a cistern-wheel that empties its water in our eyes.... But the friendly Genius of this terrestrial, or rather aquatic Ball,—for, in the physical and in the moral world, there are more tear-seas than firm land,—has provided for the poor water-insects that float about in it, for us namely, a quite special elixir against spasms in the soul: I declare this same Genius must have studied the whole pathology of man with care; for to the poor devil who is no Stoic, and can pay no Soul-doctor, that for the fissures of his cranium and his breast might prepare costly prescriptions of simples, he has stowed up cask-wise in all cellarages a precious wound-water, which the patient has only to take and pour over his slashes and bone-breakages—gin-twist, I mean, or beer, or a touch of wine.... By Heaven! it is either stupid ingratitude towards this medicinal Genius on the one hand, or theological confusion of permitted tippling with prohibited drunkenness on the other, if men do not thank God that they have something at hand, which, in the nervous vertigos of life, will instantly supply the place of Philosophy, Christianity, Judaism, Paganism andTime;—liquor, as I said.
The Conrector had long before sunset given the village post three groschens of post-money, and commissioned,—for he had a whole cabinet of ducats in his pocket, which all day he was surveying in the dark with his hand,—three thalers' worth of Pontac from the town. "I must have a Cantata merrying-making," saidhe; "if it be my last day, let it be my gayest too!" I could wish he had given a larger order; but he kept the bit of moderation between his teeth at all times; even in a threatened sham-death-night, and in the midst of jubilee. The question is, Whether he would not have restricted himself to a single bottle, if he had not wished to treat his mother and the Fräulein. Had he lived in the tenth century, when the Day of Judgment was thought to be at hand, or in other centuries, when new Noah's Deluges were expected, and when, accordingly, like sailors in a shipwreck, people bouzed up all,—he would not have spent one kreutzer more on that account. His joy was, that with his legacy he could now satisfy his head-creditor Steinberger, and leave the world an honest man: just people, who make much of money, pay their debts the most punctually.
The purple Pontac arrived at a time when Fixlein could compare the red-chalk-drawings and red-letter-titles of joy, which it would bring out on the cheeks of its drinker and drinkeresses,—with the Evening-carnation of the last clouds about the Sun....
I declare, among all the spectators of this History, no one can be thinking more about poor Thiennette than I; nevertheless, it is not permitted me to bring her out from her tiring-room to my historical scene, before the time. Poor girl! The Conrector cannot wish more warmly than his Biographer, that, in the Temple of Nature as in that of Jerusalem, there were a special door—besides that of Death—standing open, through which only the afflicted entered, that a Priest might give them solace. But Thiennette's heart-sickness over all her vanished prospects, over her entombed benefactress, over a whole life enwrapped in the pall, had hitherto, in a grief which the stony Rittmeister rather made to bleed than alleviated, swept all away from her, occupations excepted; had fettered all her steps which led not to some task, and granted to her eyes nothing to dry them or gladden them, save down-falling eyelids full of dreams and sleep.
All sorrow raises us above the civic Ceremonial-law, and makes the Prosaist a Psalmist: in sorrow alone have women courage to front opinion. Thiennette walked out only in the evening, and then only in the garden.
The Conrector could scarcely wait for the appearance of his fair friend, to offer his thanks,—and tonight also—his Pontac. Three Pontac decanters and three wine-glasses were placed outside on the projecting window-sill of his cottage; and every timehe returned from the dusky covered-way amid the flower-forests, he drank a little from his glass,—and the mother sipped now and then from within through the opened window.
I have already said, his Life-laboratory lay in the south-west corner of the garden or park, over against the Castle-Escurial, which stretched back into the village. In the north-west corner bloomed an acacia-grove, like the floral crown of the garden. Fixlein turned his steps in that direction also; to see if, perhaps, he might not cast a happy glance through the wide-latticed grove over the intervening meads to Thiennette. He recoiled a little before two stone steps leading down into a pond before this grove, which were sprinkled with fresh blood. On the flags, also, there was blood hanging. Man shudders at this oil of our life's lamp where he finds it shed: to him it is the red death-signature of the Destroying Angel. Fixlein hurried apprehensively into the grove; and found here his paler benefactress leaning on the flower-bushes; her hands with their knitting-ware sunk into her bosom, her eyes lying under their lids as if in the bandage of slumber; her left arm in the real bandage of blood-letting; and with cheeks to which the twilight was lending as much red, as late woundings—this day's included—had taken from them. Fixlein, after his first terror—not at this flower's-sleep, but at his own abrupt entrance—began to unrol the spiral butterfly's-sucker of his vision, and to lay it on the motionless leaves of this same sleeping flower. At bottom, I may assert, that this was the first time he had ever looked at her: he was now among the thirties; and he still continued to believe, that, in a young lady, he must look at the clothes only, not the person, and wait on her with his ears, not with his eyes.
I impute it to the elevating influences of the Pontac, that the Conrector plucked up courage to—turn, to come back, and employ the resuscitating means of coughing, sneezing, trampling and calling to his Shock, in stronger and stronger doses on the fair sleeper. To take her by the hand, and, with some medical apology, gently pull her out of sleep, this was an audacity of which the Conrector, so long as he could stand for Pontac, and had any grain of judgment left, could never dream.
However, he did awake her, by those other means.
Wearied, heavy-laden Thiennette! how slowly does thy eye open! The warmest balsam of this earth, soft sleep has shifted aside, and the night-air of memory is again blowing on thy nakedwounds!—And yet was the smiling friend of thy youth the fairest object which thy eye could light on, when it sank from the hanging garden of Dreams into this lower one round thee.
She herself was little conscious,—and the Conrector not at all,—that she was bending her flower-leaves imperceptibly towards a terrestrial body, namely towards Fixlein: she resembled an Italian flower, that contains cunningly concealed within it a newyear's gift, which the receiver knows not at first how to extract. But now the golden chain of her late kind deed attracted her as well towards him, as him towards her.—She at once gave her eye and her voice a mask of joy; for she did not put her tears, as Catholics do those of Christ, in relic-vials, upon altars to be worshiped. He could very suitably preface his invitation to the Pontac festival, with a long acknowledgment of thanks for the kind intervention which had opened to him the sources for procuring it. She rose slowly, and walked with him to the banquet of wine; but he was not so discreet, as at first to attempt leading her, or rather not so courageous; he could more easily have offered a young lady his hand (that is, with marriage ring) than offered her his arm. One only time in his life had he escorted a female, a Lombard Countess from the theatre; a thing truly not to be believed, were not this the secret of it, that he was obliged; for the lady, a foreigner, parted in the press from all her people, in a bad night, had laid hold of him as a sable Abbé by the arm, and requested him to take her to her inn. He, however, knew the fashions of society, and attended her no farther than the porch of his Quintus-mansion, and there directed her with his finger to her inn, which, with thirty blazing windows, was looking down from another street.
These things he cannot help. But tonight he had scarcely, with his fair faint companion, reached the bank of the pond, into which some superstitious dread of water-sprites had lately poured the pure blood of her left arm,—when, in his terror lest she fell in, with the rest of her blood, over the brink, he quite valiantly laid hold of the sick arm. Thus will much Pontac and a little courage at all times put a Conrector in case to lay hold of a Fräulein. I aver, that, at the banquet-board of the wine, at the window-sill, he continued in the same conducting position. What a soft group in the penumbra of the Earth, while Night, with its dusky waters, was falling deeper and deeper, and the silver-light of the Moon was already glancing back from the copper-ball ofthe steeple! I call the group soft, because it consists of a maiden that in two senses has been bleeding; of a mother again with tears giving her thanks for the happiness of her child; and of a pious, modest man, pouring wine, and drinking health to both, and who traces in his veins a burning lava-stream, which is boiling through his heart, and threatening piece by piece to melt it and bear it away.—A candle stood without among the three bottles, like Reason among the Passions; on this account the Conrector looked without intermission at the window-panes, for on them (the darkness of the room served as mirror-foil) was painted, among other faces which Fixlein liked, the face he liked best of all, and which he dared to look at only in reflection, the face of Thiennette.
Every minute was a Federation-festival, and every second a Preparation-Sabbath for it. The Moon was gleaming from the evening dew, and the Pontac from their eyes, and the bean-stalks were casting a shorter grating of shadow.—The quicksilver-drops of stars were hanging more and more continuous in the sable of night.—The warm vapour of the wine set our two friends (like steam-engines) again in motion.
Nothing makes the heart fuller and bolder than walking to and fro in the night. Fixlein now led the Fräulein in his arm without scruple. By reason of her lancet-wound, Thiennette could only put her hand, in a clasping position, in his arm; and he, to save her the trouble of holding fast, held fast himself, and pressed her fingers as well as might be with his arm to his heart. It would betray a total want of polished manners to censure his. At the same time, trifles are the provender of Love; the fingers are electric dischargers of a fire sparkling along every fibre; sighs are the guiding tones of two approximating hearts; and the worst and most effectual thing of all in such a case is some misfortune; for the fire of Love, like that of naphtha, likes to swim on water. Two teardrops, one in another's, one in your own eyes, compose, as with two convex lenses, a microscope which enlarges everything, and changes all sorrows into charms. Good sex! I too consider every sister in misfortune as fair; and perhaps thou wouldst deserve the name of the Fair, even because thou art the Suffering sex!
And if Professor Hunczogsky in Vienna modelled all the wounds of the human frame in wax, to teach his pupils how to cure them, I also, thou good sex, am representing in little figuresthe cuts and scars of thy spirit, though only to keep away rude hands from inflicting new ones....
Thiennette felt not the loss of the inheritance, but of her that should have left it; and this more deeply for one little trait, which she had already told his mother, as she now told him: In the last two nights of the Rittmeisterinn, when the feverish watching was holding up to Thiennette's imagination nothing but the winding-sheet and the mourning-coaches of her protectress; while she was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking on those fixed eyes, unconsciously quick drops often trickled over her cheeks, while in thought she prefigured the heavy, cumbrous dressing of her benefactress for the coffin. Once, after midnight, the dying lady pointed with her finger to her own lips. Thiennette understood her not; but rose and bent over her face. The Enfeebled tried to lift her head, but could not,—and only rounded her lips. At last, a thought glanced through Thiennette, that the Departing, whose dead arms could now press no beloved heart to her own, wished that she herself should embrace her. O then, that instant, keen and tearful she pressed her warm lips on the colder,—and she was silent like her that was to speak no more,—and she embraced alone and was not embraced. About four o'clock, the finger waved again;—she sank down on the stiffened lips—but this had been no signal, for the lips of her friend under the long kiss had grown stiff and cold....
How deeply now, before the infinite Eternity's-countenance of Night, did the cutting of this thought pass through Fixlein's warm soul: "O thou forsaken one beside me! No happy accident, no twilight hast thou, like that now glimmering in the heavens, to point to the prospect of a sunny day: without parents art thou, without brother, without friend; here alone on a disblossomed, emptied corner of the Earth; and thou, left Harvest-flower, must wave lonely and frozen over the withered stubble of the Past." That was the meaning of his thoughts, whose internal words were: "Poor young lady! Not so much as a half-cousin left; no nobleman will seek her, and she grows old so forgotten, and she is so good from the very heart—Me she has made happy—Ah, had I the presentation to the parish of Hukelum in my pocket, I should make a trial.".... Their mutual lives, which a straitcutting bond of Destiny was binding so closely together, now rose before him overhung with sable,—and he forthwith conducted his friend (for a bashful man may in an hour and a half betransformed into the boldest, and then continues so) back to the last flask, that all these upsprouting thistles and passion-flowers of sorrow might therewith be swept away. I remark, in passing, that this was stupid: the torn vine is full of water-veins as well as grapes; and a soft oppressed heart the beverage of joy can melt only into tears.
If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.—One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors—that is to say, in the long-run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits—make men at once pious, soft and poetical. The Poet, like Apollo his father, isforever a youth; and is, what other men are only once, namely in love,—or only after Pontac, namely intoxicated,—all his life long. Fixlein, who had been no poet in the morning, now became one at night: wine made him pious and soft; the Harmonica-bells in man, which sound to the tones of a higher world, must, like the glass Harmonica-bells, if they are to act, be keptmoist.
He was now standing with her again beside the wavering pond, in which the second blue hemisphere of heaven, with dancing stars and amid quivering trees, was playing; over the green hills ran the white crooked footpaths dimly along; on the one mountain was the twilight sinking together, on the other was the mist of night rising up; and over all these vapours of life, hung motionless and flaming the thousand-armed lustre of the starry heaven, and every arm held in it a burning galaxy....
It now struck eleven.... Amid such scenes, an unknown hand stretches itself out in man, and writes in foreign language on his heart, a dreadMene Mene Tekel Upharsin. "Perhaps by twelve I am dead," thought our friend, in whose soul the Cantata-Sunday, with all its black funeral piles, was mounting up.
The whole future Crucifixion-path of his friend lay prickly and bethorned before him; and he saw every bloody trace from which she lifted her foot,—she who had made his own way soft with flowers and leaves. He could no longer restrain himself; trembling in his whole frame, and with a trembling voice, he solemnly said to her: "If the Lord this night call me away, let the half of my fortune be yours; for it is your goodness I must thank that I am free of debts, as few Teachers are."
Thiennette, unacquainted with our sex, naturally mistook thisspeech for a proposal of marriage; and the fingers of her wounded arm, tonight for the first time, pressed suddenly against the arm in which they lay; the only living mortal's arm, by which Joy, Love and the Earth, were still united with her bosom. The Conrector, rapturously terrified at the first pressure of a female hand, bent over his right to take hold of her left; and Thiennette, observing his unsuccessful movement, lifted her fingers, and laid her whole wounded arm in his, and her whole left hand in his right. Two lovers dwell in the Whispering-gallery,[48]where the faintest breath bodies itself forth into a sound. The good Conrector received and returned this blissful love-pressure, wherewith our poor powerless soul, stammering, hemmed in, longing, distracted, seeks for a warmer language, which exists not: he was overpowered; he had not the courage to look at her; but he looked into the gleam of the twilight, and said (and here for unspeakable love the tears were running warm over his cheeks): "Ah, I will give you all; fortune, life and all that I have, my heart and my hand."
[48]In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper sounds over across a space of 143 feet.
[48]In St. Paul's Church at London, where the slightest whisper sounds over across a space of 143 feet.
She was about to answer, but casting a side-glance, she cried, with a shriek: "Ah, Heaven!" He started round; and perceived the white muslin sleeve all dyed with blood; for in putting her arm into his, she had pushed away the bandage from the open vein. With the speed of lightning, he hurried her into the acacia-grove; the blood was already running from the muslin; he grew paler than she, for every drop of it was coming from his heart. The blue-white arm was bared; the bandage was put on; he tore a piece of gold from his pocket; clapped it, as one does, with open arteries, on the spouting fountain, and bolted with this golden bar, and with the bandage over it, the door out of which her afflicted life was hurrying.—
When it was over, she looked up to him; pale, languid, but her eyes were two glistening fountains of an unspeakable love, full of sorrow and full of gratitude.—The exhausting loss of blood was spreading her soul asunder in sighs. Thiennette was dissolved into inexpressible softness; and the heart, lacerated by so many years, by so many arrows, was plunging with all its wounds in warm streams of tears, to be healed; as chapped flutes close together by lying in water, and get back their tones.—Before such a magic form, before such a pure heavenly love, her sympathising friend was melted between the flames of joy and grief;and sank, with stifled voice, and bent down by love and rapture, on the pale angelic face, the lips of which he timidly pressed, but did not kiss, till all-powerful Love bound its girdles round them, and drew the two closer and closer together, and their two souls, like two tears, melted into one. O now, when it struck twelve, the hour of death, did not the lover fancy that her lips were drawing his soul away, and all the fibres and all the nerves of his life closed spasmodically round the last heart in this world, round the last rapture of existence?... Yes, happy man, thou didst express thy love; for in thy love thou thoughtest to die....
However, he did not die. After midnight, there floated a balmy morning air through the shaken flowers, and the whole spring was breathing. The blissful lover, setting bounds even to his sea of joy, reminded his delicate beloved, who was now his bride, of the dangers from night-cold; and himself of the longer night-cold of Death, which was now for long years passed over.—Innocent and blessed, they rose from the grove of their betrothment, from its dusk broken by white acacia-flowers and straggling moonbeams. And without, they felt as if a whole wide Past had sunk away in a convulsion of the world; all was new, light and young. The sky stood full of glittering dewdrops from the everlasting Morning; and the stars quivered joyfully asunder, and sank, resolved into beams, down into the hearts of men.—The Moon, with her fountain of light, had overspread and kindled all the garden; and was hanging above in a starless Blue, as if she had consumed the nearest stars; and she seemed like a smaller wandering Spring, like a Christ's-face smiling in love of man.—
Under this light they looked at one another for the first time, after the first words of love; and the sky gleamed magically down on the disordered features with which the first rapture of love was still standing written on their faces....
Dream, ye beloved, as ye wake, happy as in Paradise, innocent as in Paradise!
Office-impost. One of the most important of Petitions.
The finest thing was his awakening in his European Settlement in the giant Schadeck bed!—With the inflammatory, tickling,eating fever of love in his breast; with the triumphant feeling, that he had now got the introductory program of love put happily by; and with the sweet resurrection from his living prophetic burial; and with the joy that now, among his thirties, he could, for the first time, cherish hopes of a longer life (and did not longer mean at least till seventy?) than he could ten years ago;—with all this stirring life-balsam, in which the living fire-wheel of his heart was rapidly revolving, he lay here, and laughed at his glancing portrait in the bed-canopy; but he could not do it long, he was obliged to move. For a less happy man, it would have been gratifying to have measured,—as pilgrims measure the length of their pilgrimage,—not so much by steps as by body-lengths, like Earth-diameters, the superficial content of the bed. But Fixlein, for his own part, had to launch from his bed into warm billowy Life, he had now his dear good Earth again to look after, and a Conrectorship thereon, and a bride to boot. Besides all this, his mother downstairs now admitted that he had last night actually glided through beneath the scythe of Death, like supple-grass, and that yesterday she had not told him merely out of fear of his fear. Still a cold shudder went over him,—especially as he was sober now,—when he looked round at the high Tarpeian Rock, four hours' distance behind him, on the battlements of which he had last night walked hand in hand with Death.
The only thing that grieved him was, that it was Monday, and that he must back to the Gymnasium. Such a freightage of joys he had never taken with him on his road to town. After four he issued from his house, satisfied with coffee (which he drank in Hukelum merely for his mother's sake, who, for two days after, would still have portions of this woman's-wine to draw from the lees of the pot-sediment) into thecoolingdawning May-morning (for joy needs coolness, sorrow sun); his Betrothed comes—not indeed to meet him, but still—into his hearing, by her distant morning hymn; he makes but one momentary turn into the blissful haven of the blooming acacia-grove, which still, like the covenant sealed in it, has no thorns; he dips his warm hand in the cold-bath of the dewy leaves; he wades with pleasure through the beautifying-water of the dew, which, as it imparts colour to faces, eats it away from boots ("but with thirty ducats, a Conrector may make shift to keep two pairs of boots on the hook").—And now the Moon, as it were the hanging seal of his lastnight's happiness, dips down into the West, like an emptied bucket of light, and in the East the other overrunning bucket, the Sun, mounts up, and the gushes of light flow broader and broader.—
The city stood in the celestial flames of Morning. Here his divining-rod (his gold-roll, which, excepting one sixteenth of an inch broken off from it, he carried along with him) began to quiver over all the spots where booty and silver-veins of enjoyment were concealed; and our rod-diviner easily discovered that the city and the future were a true entire Potosi of delights.
In his Conrectorate closet he fell upon his knees, and thanked God—not so much for his heritage and bride as—for his life: for he had gone away on Sunday morning with doubts whether he should ever come back; and it was purely out of love to the reader, and fear lest he might fret himself too much with apprehension, that I cunningly imputed Fixlein's journey more to his desire of knowing what was in the will, than of making his own will in presence of his mother. Every recovery is a bringing back and palingenesia of our youth: one loves the Earth and those that are on it with a new love.—The Conrector could have found in his heart to take all his class by the locks, and press them to his breast; but he only did so to his adjutant, the Quartaner, who, in the first Letter-box, was still sitting in the rank of a Quintaner....
His first expedition, after school-hours, was to the house of Meister Steinberger, where, without speaking a word, he counted down fifty florins cash, in ducats, on the table: "At last I repay you," said Fixlein, "the moiety of my debt, and give you many thanks."
"Ey, Herr Conrector," said the Quartermaster, and continued calmly stuffing puddings as before, "in my bond it is said,payable at three months' mutual notice. How could a man like me go on, else?—However, I will change you the gold pieces." Thereupon he advised him that it might be more judicious to take back a florin or two, and buy himself a better hat, and whole shoes: "if you like," added he, "to get a calfskin and half a dozen hareskins dressed, they are lying upstairs."—I should think, for my own part, that to the reader it must be as little a matter of indifference as it was to the Butcher, whether the hero of such a History appear before him with an old tattered potlid of a hat, and a pump-sucker and leg-harness pair of boots,or in suitable apparel.—In short, before St. John's day, the man was dressed with taste and pomp.
But now came two most peculiarly important papers—at bottom only one, the Petition for the Hukelum parsonship—to be elaborated; in regard to which I feel as if I myself must assist.... It were a simple turn, if now at least the assembled public did not pay attention.
In the first place, the Conrector searched out and sorted all the Consistorial and Councillor quittances, or rather the toll-bills of the road-money, which he had been obliged to pay, before the toll-gates at the Quintusship and Conrectorship had been thrown open: for the executor of the Schadeck testament had to reimburse him the whole, as his discharge would express it, "to penny and farthing." Another would have summed up this post-excise much more readily; by merely looking what he—owed; as these debt-bills and those toll-bills, like parallel passages, elucidate and confirm each other. But in Fixlein's case, there was a small circumstance of peculiarity at work; which I cannot explain till after what follows.
It grieved him a little that for his two offices he had been obliged to pay and to borrow no larger a sum than 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny. The legacy, it is true, was to pass directly from the hands of the testamentary executor into those of the Regiments-Quartermaster; but yet he could have liked well, had he—for man is a fool from the very foundation of him—had more to pay, and therefore to inherit. The whole Conrectorate he had, by a slight deposit of 90 florins, plucked, as it were, from the Wheel of Fortune; and so small a sum must surprise my reader: but what will he say, when I tell him that there are countries where the entry-money into schoolrooms is even more moderate? In Scherau, a Conrector is charged only 88 florins, and perhaps he may have an income triple of this sum. Not to speak of Saxony (what, in truth, was to be expected from the cradle of the Reformation, in Religion and Polite Literature), where a schoolmaster and a parson havenothingto pay,—even in Bayreuth, for example, in Hof, the progress of improvement has been such, that a Quartus—a Quartus do I say,—a Tertius—a Tertius do I say,—a Conrector, at entrance on his post, is not required to pay down more than:
Fl. rhen.Kr. rhen.3049For taking the oaths at the Consistorium.40To the Syndic for the Presentation.20To the then Bürgermeister.457½For the Government-sanction.Total81 fl.56½ kr.
If the printing-charges of a Rector do stand a little higher in some points, yet, on the other hand, a Tertius, Quartus &c. come cheaper from the press than even a Conrector. Now it is clear that in this case a schoolmaster can subsist; since, in the course of the very first year, he gets an overplus beyond thisdock-moneyof his office. A schoolmaster must, like his scholars, have been advanced from class to class, before these his loans to Government, together with the interest for delay of payment, can jointly amount to so much as his yearly income in the highest class. Another thing in his favour is, that our institutions do not—as those of Athens did—prohibit people from entering on office while in debt; but every man, with his debt-knapsack on his shoulders, mounts up, step after step, without obstruction. The Pope, in large benefices, appropriates the income of the first year under the title ofAnnates, or First Fruits; and accordingly he, in all cases, bestows any large benefice on the possessor of a smaller one, thereby to augment both his own revenues and those of others; but it shows, in my opinion, a bright distinction between Popery and Lutheranism, that the Consistoriums of the latter abstract from their school-ministers and church-ministers not perhaps above two-thirds of their first yearly income; though they too, like the Pope, must naturally have an eye to vacancies.
It may be that I shall here come in collision with the Elector of Mentz, when I confess, that in Schmausen'sCorp. Jur. Pub. Germ.I have turned up the Mentz-Imperial-Court-Chancery-tax-ordinance of the 6th January 1659; and there investigated how much this same Imperial-Court-Chancery demands, as contrasted with a Consistorium. For example, any man that wishes to be baked or sodden into aPoet Laureate, has 50 florins tax-dues, and 20 florins Chancery-dues to pay down; whereas, for 20 florins more, he might have been made a Conrector, who is a poet of this species, as it were by the by andex officio.—The institution of a Gymnasium is permitted for 1000 florins; an extraordinary sum, with which the whole body of the teachers in the instituted Gymnasium might with us clear off the entrymoneys of theirschoolrooms. Again, a Freiherr, who, at any rate, often enough grows old without knowing how, must purchase thevenia ætatiswith 200 hard florins; while with the half sum he might have become a schoolmaster, and hereagewould have come of its own accord.—And a thousand such things!—They prove, however, that matters can be at no bad pass in our Governments and Circles, where promotions are sold dearer to Folly than to Diligence, and where it costs more to institute a school than to serve in one.
The remarks I made on this subject to a Prince, as well as the remarks a Town-Syndic made on it to myself, are too remarkable to be omitted for mere dread of digressiveness.
The Syndic—a man of enlarged views, and of fiery patriotism, the warmth of which was the more beneficent that he collected all the beams of it into one focus, and directed them to himself and his family—gave me (I had perhaps been comparing the School-bench and the School-stair to thebenchand theladder, on which people are laid when about to be tortured) the best reply: "If a schoolmaster consume nothing but 30 reichsthalers;[49]if he annually purchase manufactured goods, according as Political Economists have calculated for each individual, namely, to the amount of 5 reichsthalers; and no more hundredweights of victual than these assume, namely 10; in short, if he live like a substantial wood-cutter,—then the Devil must be in it, if he cannot yearly lay by so much net profit, as shall, in the long-run, pay the interest of his entry-debts."
[49]So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly requires in Germany.
[49]So much, according to Political Economists, a man yearly requires in Germany.
The Syndic must have failed to convince me at the time, since I afterwards told the Flachsenfingen Prince:[50]"Illustrious Sir, you know not, but I do—not a player in your Theatre would act the Schoolmaster in Engel'sProdigal Son, three nights running, for such a sum as every real Schoolmaster has to take for acting it all the days of the year.—In Prussia, Invalids are made Schoolmasters; with us, Schoolmasters are made Invalids."...
[50]This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be excused by the equally singular relation, wherein the Biographer stands to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold here, were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title ofDog-post-days, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair 1795, I hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.
[50]This singular tone of my address to a Prince can only be excused by the equally singular relation, wherein the Biographer stands to the Flachsenfingen Sovereign, and which I would willingly unfold here, were it not that, in my Book, which, under the title ofDog-post-days, I mean to give to the world at Easter-fair 1795, I hoped to expound the matter to universal satisfaction.
But to our story! Fixlein wrote out the inventory of hisCrown-debts; but with quite a different purpose than the reader will guess, who has still the Schadeck testament in his head. In one word, he wanted to be Parson of Hukelum. To be a clergyman, and in the place where his cradle stood, and all the little gardens of his childhood, his mother also, and the grove of betrothment,—this was an open gate into a New Jerusalem, supposing even that the living had been nothing but a meagre penitentiary. The main point was, he might marry, if he were appointed. For, in the capacity of lank Conrector, supported only by the strengthening-girth of his waistcoat, and with emoluments whereby scarcely the purchase-money of a—purse was to be come at; in this way he was more like collecting wick and tallow for his burial-torch than for his bridal one.
For the Schoolmaster class are, in well-ordered States, as little permitted to marry as the Soldiery. InConringius de Antiquitutibus Academicis, where in every leaf it is proved that all cloisters were originally schools, I hit upon the reason. Our schools are now cloisters, and consequently we endeavour to maintain in our teachers at least an imitation of the Three Monastic Vows. The vow of Obedience might perhaps be sufficiently enforced by School-Inspectors; but the second vow, that of Celibacy, would be more hard of attainment, were it not that, by one of the best political arrangements, the third vow, I mean a beautiful equality in Poverty, is so admirably attended to, that no man who has made it needs any farthertestimonium paupertatis;—and nowletthis man, if he likes, lay hold of a matrimonial half, when of the two halves each has a whole stomach, and nothing for it but half-coins and half-beer!...
I know well, millions of my readers would themselves compose this Petition for the Conrector, and ride with it to Schadeck to his Lordship, that so the poor rogue might get the sheepfold, with the annexed wedding-mansion: for they see clearly enough, that directly thereafter one of the best Letter-Boxes would be written that ever came from such a repository.
Fixlein's Petition was particularly good and striking: it submitted to the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the parish: his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service; therefore he prayed," &c.
2. "The here-documented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten testament secured him, he himself could clear, incase he obtained the living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &c.
Voluntary Note by me.It is plain he means to bribe his Godfather, whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader, blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine. Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons, by whom not indeed the church and churchyard—though these things are articles of commerce in England—so much as the true management of them had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know from Lange,[51]that the Church must support its patron, when he has nothing to live upon: and might not a nobleman, before he actually began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?—
[51]HisClerical Law, p. 551.
[51]HisClerical Law, p. 551.
3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fräulein von Thiennette, and given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed the said Fräulein were he once provided for," &c.
Voluntary Note by me.I hold this ground to be the strongest in the whole Petition. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten and full of millepedes: she was his Œconoma, his Castle-Stewardess and Legatessa Laterefor his domestics; and with her pretensions for an alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....
4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."
My Voluntary Note.The dog then, it seems, to which thenobleman has hitherto been godfather, is to receive its name asecondtime from him!—But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church, how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies deeper: not the contractedsituation, but the contractedeye, not a favourite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic, a soul that cannotmeasureandseparatetheconcentriccircles of human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all——In short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.
The Conrector wrote out his petition splendidly in five propitious evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some months, if Scioppius' word is to be taken; still less so long as another scholar at a Latin epistle, who—truly we have nothing but Morhof's word for it—hatched it during four whole months; inserting his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases, accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more thorough-going genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after-life.
Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel, if he get the parsonage: can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as, according to Möser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they made in theforenoon(in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),—so the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly happen, as at those hours they are—sleeping.
Sermon. School-Exhibition. Splendid Mistake.
The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreutzers, one halfpenny Frankish; but no answer: the dog remained without name, his master without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer passed away; and the Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidatebreeding-pond, and thrown him into thefeeding-pondof the Hukelum parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the Subrector) granting any one petition, till he had seven-and-thirty dyers', buttonmakers', tinsmiths' sons, whose petitions he could at the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a nobleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess, or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the Peerage, while still a fœtus, may with more propriety be likened to thespinner, which, contrariwise to all other insects, passes from the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's womb.—
But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him, that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still thirty-five florins left to himself, asallodiumand pocket-money, wherewith he might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means: Every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random, two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk. His purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too, when on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these funds from among his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy, having offered it as bounty-money, and luck-penny to the patron, this false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church-doorwould certainly have vexed him; but now if he had missed the knocker, he had the luck-penny again, and could be merry.
I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native village, with a brief transitory notice.
In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing; and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday before all the peasants, who had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; farther, before his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her satin muff; farther, before his Lordship, whom he can positively command to be blessed; and finally, before his muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same lips can both kiss and preach: in my opinion, I say, when a man effects all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would paint his situation, that he—hold his jaw; and of the reader who would sympathise with it, that he open his, and preach himself.——
But what I mustex officiodepict, is the day to which this Sunday was but the prelude, the vigil and the whet; I mean the prelude, the vigil and the whet to theMartini Actus, orMartinmas Exhibition, of his school. On Sunday was the Sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the universe.
I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more interesting, than some Investiture of a Bishop, or theopera seriaof a Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who have been at schools, and who know how the school-drama of an Actus, and the stage-manager, andthe playbill (the Program) thereof are to be estimated, still without overrating their importance.
Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of theMartini Actus, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording the Conrector's Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, Whether in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectiousbarbarisms? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also our Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question: Whether the Romans, when they taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than in this same? Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what follows, in his own words:
"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation, the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children, grandchildren and children's children, down to our own times, of this great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured, with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, withthe Advocate Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in 1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject: however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to, on the 14th of November, from the mouths of sis well-conditioned perorators. In the first place, shall
"Gottlieb Spiesglass, a Flachsenfinger, endeavour to show, in a Latin oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the Luther family. After him strives
"Friedrich Christian Krabbler, from Hukelum, in German prose, to appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will
"Daniel Lorenz Stenzingerdeliver, in Latin verse, an account of Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give opportunity to
"Nikol Tobias Pfizmanto come forward in French, and recount the most important circumstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years, university-life and riper age. And now, when
"Andreas Eintarmshall have endeavoured, in German verse, to apologise for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther, will
"Justus Strobel, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons of the Flachsenfingen School, and then farther bring forward those portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know absolutely nothing, they being sparedDeo volentefor the speakers of the nextMartini Actus."
The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could not be present at the great school-festival, especiallyladies, made their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but on the other hand I am equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with his triumphal chariot and six—to call the six brethren-speakers coach-horses—next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor gentlemen. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today'sOvation, which is leading on tomorrow'sTriumph: on thy dissolving countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday clothes humbly to place herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima class-room. It were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom she has borne under her heart can direct such noble young gentlemen, and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things and understand them too;—or the son, who, like some of the heroes of Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the late Burchardt Grossmann, who under the initial letters of the stanzas in his song, "Brich an, du liebe Morgenröthe," inserted the letters of his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herbwoman for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making herself one-twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man as wise—though indeed as very clever and pedantic—who can fret his gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World (so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe, the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree and Life-tree, and the dew-drops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths and night-moths, fall universally into the same error, only on different leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which the schoolmaster issues hisprograms, the dramaturgist his playbills, the classical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,—does it, if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his ownsimilarfolly; and laughs in regard to his neighbour, at nothing but mankind and himself.
The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to Hukelum, to give the Fräulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this glorious business.—
And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus itself as shall be single of its kind.
But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.——
It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum Presentation for the SubrectorFüchslein in his pocket. To the last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage: but he had distinguished ill betwixtSubandConrector; and had besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for he thought: "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our Fräulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats already?" That his Lordship could pass over his own godson, never entered the man's head.
Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the ParsonFixleinof Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own: and finding moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but only of aSchul-unter-befehlslaberor School-undergovernor (instead of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error. Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector—we two, the reader and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful saltations—on his gratefully-streaming eyes—on his full hands so laden with bounty—on the present of two ducats, which he drops into the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister), or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not ask tidings of the noble health of his benefactor over and over,though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning, shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined on the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus, though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to call this evening in passing at his mother's, and give her a lecture for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive today.
The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical—and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked God without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters and with coloured ink, as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except in ornamental letters and when newly washed;[52]—and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus—for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling,—he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.