Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 27

Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given, became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....

But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the n.o.ble side.

It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had been showing the bad side, and _vice versa_. His opinion was, that the poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to take for his lever all of n.o.ble that there is on the earth,--Nature, Freedom, Virtue, and G.o.d; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings, the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.

He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said, "Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"

(she meant to say, to her s.e.x) "quite too little, if one should take from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk, custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The n.o.ble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside, and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as well as he, that the Devil meant her Dah.o.r.e: but he was silent; his soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.

During this disputation the n.o.ble Mat had, un.o.bserved, cut out the whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]

which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently, drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeb.a.l.l.s, and went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the company.

But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to give an answer.

When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had in his case to appease.--

"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself, therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart, and all become still again within him.

But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.

Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring, as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not _disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.

Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the _Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months, when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now portray them regularly.

Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant heart,--not with the drum-roll of amus.e.m.e.nts; under this it would only bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.

At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.

He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more, morning notes....

These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.

"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the coc.o.o.ns of loving b.u.t.terflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the outer-t.i.tle-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I a.s.sert this,"

he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it, because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon the fair s.e.x, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels, hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took letters, then packages, finally pa.s.sengers."--

He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the head, and, to be sure, (as a certain n.o.bleman did other stuff,) not from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the next morning, like the n.o.bleman, they honestly send the goods back again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables of the G.o.ds. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.

By way of excusing himself for a.s.sociating with coquettes on the footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic, before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, merely to examine her more nearly.

He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the _union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]

grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager, upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the perfect white."

These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?

Nothing chills the n.o.blest parts of the inner man more than intercourse with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity seeks them,--this s.n.a.t.c.hing only at the next moment, this racing by of the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors, who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt, which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome, his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too tolerant towards the bad.

In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in both the flowers of spring!

As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of another kind against the whole s.e.x, though never against individuals.

In this last circ.u.mstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious _scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]

in front and in the face."

As a.s.saf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the Tarantula-season was not to be embarra.s.sed by anything: he went and came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was, telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are nevertheless incidental to true politeness.

Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he had still the old veneration of a n.o.ble heart. I will give at least one example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can antic.i.p.ate how the Konigsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre tomes, commencons comme les faiseurs d'Epopees par le reste_."[273]

To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!

Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how Victor stood with all the people about him.

With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor, she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this Victor with a still greater, especially as lie knew she must feel that, in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded, carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too, the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."

The n.o.ble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle Mother of G.o.d. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-doc.u.ments, which I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love, and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence, while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable portion of the Court.

Agnola was a.s.siduous in testifying an ever increasing grat.i.tude to our hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish, significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge, and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand, or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not _I_.

With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.

The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!

all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.

24. DOG-POST-DAY.

Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.

On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would not take any form; then, too, he was embarra.s.sed. Clotilda soon took leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an hour longer.

Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see, nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said: "To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the hair-pin."[277]

By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the n.o.ble Matthieu, if I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.

Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the candidate for examination.

And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!

Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling Peter, whom many a c.o.c.k-crow had brought rather to tears than to repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous, whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.

Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.

The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which, in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.

O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching _this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so pa.s.singly my pleasure at your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full of smiles, and win for your s.e.x the praise of opening its heart as gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy heaven?

Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued: "Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember, brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however, in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself, "As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting eye toward the rising curtain.

Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to Pylades:--

"Remind me not of those enchanting days, When a free room thy house afforded me: Thy n.o.ble father wisely, tenderly, Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth; When thou, an ever-gay a.s.sociate, Even as a motley, light-winged b.u.t.terfly Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day Didst dance and hover round me with new life, And win thy bliss a way into my soul."

Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to her brother Orestes,--