Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 18

FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY, AND PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.

I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore, unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as, according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first, although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious, _hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for good reviewers and universities.

I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far as the letter I.

INTERCALARY--AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.

A.

Age of Women.--Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.

22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor, namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years, should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age, and not any earthly age,--because she does not deviate from that standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce into the _Intrigue drama_ of their life already in the thirtieth year, for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.

B.

Basedow's School System.--Basedow proposes in his _Philalethia_ to hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their own development, and to a.s.sign them only mute attendants, who should not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess, however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these little probationers some instruction, though it were the least possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as there are deaf and dumb pupils.

C (_vide_ K).

D.

Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the pa.s.sions, nevertheless will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which (according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.

E.

Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man, as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.

F (_see_ Ph)

G.

G.o.ddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as G.o.ds than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart _G.o.ddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to obey.

H.

H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit their--heirs. But never have I compared these b.u.t.terflies to anything but b.u.t.terflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet sp.a.w.n their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.

H.

Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had meant to a.s.sert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half) poor devils too much to do it.

The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circ.u.mstance that drove his genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner, whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs, whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but, as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting, was again guzzling in an _alibi_.

I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.

I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.

17. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.-- Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.

When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate, (the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese, if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate, fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.

Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress; and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper n.o.bility, a baked one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face anywhere except in the shaving-gla.s.s, they shall mould me (for I am least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.

Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens, instead of the wooden door, the gla.s.s one of the apothecary's shop. O my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!

In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.

But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa, and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.

"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the country."

The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it, and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."

The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_ newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship had hired for him, and his chamber.

--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he, and twirled the ta.s.sel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the _heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier; either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah, ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-ta.s.sel up shorter.) "But, thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father, those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_) even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the curtain-ta.s.sel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.

--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which, that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!

Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine, "Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a few pa.s.sages with the gouty Januarius.

--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"

thinks the apothecary.

But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood, in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor, however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand, instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it, and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper, whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice, then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything more agreeable than Victor's a.s.sertion, which set him free from the prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.

Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give his recipe for it, after he had a.s.serted, by way of consolation, that "an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on th.o.r.n.y straw sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]

Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague, what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should prescribe:--

_Pulv. Rhei Orient_.

_Sem. Anisi Stellati_ ----_F[oe]niculi_ _Cort. Aurant. immat_.

_Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.

_Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.

_Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--

"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.

p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as occasion requires."[197]

As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.

When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to ask?"

The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circ.u.mstance--since the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the very same day.