Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces Part 8

She answered quite innocently, "Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I know, but I really have _not_ the slightest idea."

Then the G.o.ddess of Peace took from the G.o.d of Sleep his poppy garland, and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair, garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming, icefields of the land of dreams--the magic shadowy background of the noisy jarring, shifting day--our camera obscura full of moving miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.

END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.

The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep, and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall, and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.

The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a looking-gla.s.s in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I myself was. But the Captain--for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because she was useful in the business--would let her speak to no man whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas, a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn't exactly everybody who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (_i. e_. one her father shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his organ, and then play away fur an hour to this Argus till he should close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked into. I _did_ manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my pains.

The old man--who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time I had remained the evening before--had this evening only _pretended_ to be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as sleeping powders.

The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it, and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of congratulation--"Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter's head with all sorts of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till she'll be of no more use in a shop than----"

"Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!" said I quite quietly, taking him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; "just listen to one single, _half_-word!"

I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, "Herr Pigtail--for in Charles the Great's time every officer was so styled, because in those days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now--Herr Pigtail, I'm not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going out and the new year's coming in. I a.s.sure you solemnly that I am the son of the ----,[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for G.o.d's sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman reads one of whom will be her husband and every tradesman's wife. Yet for all this reading, there's still plenty of spinning and cooking going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And as for _corrupting_ her--why! that's just what a man who reads will find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads, and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me entreat you, Captain."

"If you would but just mind your own affairs! What's the girl to _you_?" was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and that not her own), which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.

It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I have said, I hadn't done it. I had said to myself, "Enjoy a pretty face as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a nightingale's, and don't touch the picture or throttle the bird. What!

must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into camisoles?"

Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince.

That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter kind.[33] "Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every syllable; you have pinned her, poor b.u.t.terfly, into your letter book; but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkaes's troubles occur, and his death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside her own."

The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder and louder: but I say no more about it--every additional word would have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running (I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers' children get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own.

Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.

I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once, so that it might not appear which was for which).

"Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the future--bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days, not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good night."

It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me more--particularly in an appropriate mouth--than your sapless, new poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very different kinds--for you see it was only eleven o'clock and the cold night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I didn't want to pa.s.s from the old year to the new in sleep, though that is how I would pa.s.s from this life to the next. I resolved to take that flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter company.

Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his own individuality--the widest s.p.a.ces and the narrowest have the same powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than that which is what forgets--namely, the forgetter's _self_. Not only do the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also, renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own Ego, and its position with respect to other ent.i.ties--deafer and blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of contemplation (which we always _move away_ to a certain distance from ourselves, and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before--me so to speak under my nose.

Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay, and his own Ego into the bargain?

But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage--a separate ent.i.ty. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points of time--stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence--new years'

days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks about him, and says--"How the current has been carrying me along, drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!"

Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, there can be no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of the world.

I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was all aglow--the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed to be kneeling motionless on the ground.

And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell, with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, "Now has Destiny, with the twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes."

The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.

I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.

I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm, and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the distant march of the approaching foe. "Shallow, timid soul," thought I, "why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of the clear, still night--thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come, and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence, no inscriptions yet--why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy Solomon's ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who dwells within our b.r.e.a.s.t.s. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to _be_ death and the future itself."

In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to the bier--ay, and ourselves as well--our old wounds burn anew, and our hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the _ignes fatui_ and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth, every new year's night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother of many G.o.ds in us--and in such a night there begins for us a better normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father had knelt.

But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take his flight with other birds of pa.s.sage, and, bright with glittering plumes, and hailed by skylarks' anthems, come and alight upon our sh.o.r.es.

The distant new year's music flowed around me still I felt much happier, and far more tender; I saw the _coming_ sorrows in the new born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like sorrows that are _past_, or like the music around me--just as the rain which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in the distance like music.

But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household circle of one great family--and as the music, like lovelier sighs, accompanied my thoughts--as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now--but the great Beneficence spreads their _seed_ for evermore)--when I thought of the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier when they opened their eyes in the morning--and when I thought of those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a wish,--my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.

And in the shimmer, and amid the music, 1 heard voices of my friends, and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new year's wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely _think_ my own--

"Oh! may you all be happy _all_ the years of your lives."

END OF BOOK I.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.

It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every preface I write I am obliged to append a book--like the endors.e.m.e.nt on a bill of exchange--or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles in authorship by way of amus.e.m.e.nt has his books sent to him all ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads--which is nothing but painting the _corona_ about the sun. As yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize medals and commemoration medals of other people's cleverness at the service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off wholesale before very long (I don't see what else I can do), and bring out a book--consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.

They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair, and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary world will only be beglorified in _corpore_, in _coro_, and I shall be (so to speak) making a present of a patent of n.o.bility to the republic of letters in the lump,--as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death, hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many lines--for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a hundred five-dollar pieces.

I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,--as one cannot _quite_ lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty--I carefully pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public are, by _them_, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah's chariot, of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.

In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author of 'HESPERUS' has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces, and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well worthy of perusal.

PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 'HESPERUS.'

The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.

Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own _im_mortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.

The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages.

If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do? Like a child's, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil.