Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 20

"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood; but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then, with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know, then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-etat_ to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time, merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward her--_brother_, he thought to himself.

And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the first pet.i.tion, not to draw all possible advantage from the first opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.

--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the other not a bed in the house....

No soul came.

I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician, Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.

The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning this very day from their facetious flying tour.

That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.

January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.

My hero, who at the outset had pa.s.sed himself through the mint, and come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that one may know what the trumpery is worth.

For Busching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is a true torment; for my ma.n.u.script is, besides, so large already, that my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.

What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January, saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways, crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either of these two is to him G.o.d or beast."

What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up against G.o.d the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him, "that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can bind them, and that neither is G.o.d Justinian, nor is Kant Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw, that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one city-magistrate may live.

He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him, and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst this Babylonian din the Consistorial t.i.thingman drew up one of the best pet.i.tions that the n.o.ble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to the Prince.

A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PEt.i.tION OF THE CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.

"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them, and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing, shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who, in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_ stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These, and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--

"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.

"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas. .h.i.therto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night, as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.

But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?

That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.

In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he, "are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_ from payment.----

Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the billow of money, and began:--

"Your Highness!

"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_ for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest Consistorial administration has been able to sc.r.a.pe together lies there on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope: why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!

if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_ worshipped the G.o.ddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."

Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all, impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is, therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones, that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on the carca.s.s of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----

My correspondent a.s.sures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the Prince's own hand.

Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna, one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.

He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it, reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.

In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor, that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak, timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword, because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.

But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls, exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her rich heart found on this cla.s.sic avenue nothing but great remembrances, magic pa.s.sages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....

"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher n.o.bility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have dissuaded him from the _n.o.ble masque_.

Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air, probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.

More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and, in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage talking with his little G.o.dson, and saying to him, "Dearest good Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights, and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.

The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a word with the Princess to get his and their pet.i.tion granted....

Clotilda became maid-of-honor.

Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house, and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher pet.i.tion had _repeated_ his own with such effect." I set up this n.o.bleman as a model to all people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _n.o.ble_ in the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.

Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.

Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it, but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is nothing of it all!

For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit, every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were, besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin, thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had pa.s.sed over quite other seas and degrees of lat.i.tude and longitude than he or his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said he.--

But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.

The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too, there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a word, he was vexed.

The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra flyleaf.

EXTRA FLY-LEAF,

_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.

Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly, however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen, where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the Konigsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?

I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore, represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that, while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna, and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.

That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a gla.s.s, in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes, and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing gla.s.s, which, by shaking, distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves, according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether people who peer so deeply into the gla.s.s can love drinking?--

It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.

Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up over the whole world of the actual by that n.o.bility of soul, by that contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to "Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a "Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write, "With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached, to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.

The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-, relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....

In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by the cases of those that have been hung.

_End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.

But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think otherwise!--

So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good wife of the Parson:--