The Campaner Thal and Other Writings Part 4

But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones; and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,--bright, shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and said expressively, "We are yet so far from the cruel earth."

When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak.... --And how could I speak better now, dearest friend!

LIFE

OF

QUINTUS FIXLEIN.

EXTRACTED FROM

FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.

TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

LETTER TO MY FRIENDS, INSTEAD OF PREFACE.

Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the t.i.tle-page; on these we are now printing.

My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled from various public and private doc.u.ments. With this Biography, dear Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures, but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.

Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world, with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses, or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third, finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of alternating between the other two.

This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.

The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Pa.s.sion (were it but that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external, as the madman in a worse sense does; every _fixed_ idea, such as rules every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long, fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![33]

This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving brethren, whose souls have not even wing-sh.e.l.ls, to say nothing of wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State, and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to the sh.o.r.e, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors, Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons, what way of becoming happy _here_ can I possibly point out?

My _second_ merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that b.u.t.terfly-dust is peac.o.c.k-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent _Fixlein's Life_ into the Messrs. Lubeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same _Life_--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals; in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when these gentle persons have been forth as amba.s.sadresses visiting some Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost, roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at home.

The _third_ skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The foregoing _second_ way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The _first_ is too good for him. He has not always the force, like Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and, like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting than his _fatigues_. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps, Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.

But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which his children may enact some good pieces from the _Children's Friend_.

Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter, have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is seething in b.u.t.ter for the Author of this Work.

As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[34]

half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that opportunity.

Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his half anonymity,[35] and for the first time subscribes himself with his whole true name,

Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

_Hof in Voigtland, 29th June_, 1795.

LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN, DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.

IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.

FIRST LETTER-BOX.

Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.

Egidius Zebedaus Fixlein had just for eight days been Quintus,[36] and fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar.

These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days'

Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet, and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; b.u.t.terflies,--or roots of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.

The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn.

The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and the year of Grace 1791.

"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love, children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey, room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock also was his manikin.

He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields on which the grain was already reaped.

But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum; not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the _Tiers etat_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.

You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye; since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaus. Could she ever tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had nothing to feast on, and must pa.s.s the cake-garden like other gardens, merely smelling at it?

"d.i.c.kens! Thou already, Zebedaus!" said the mother, giving an embarra.s.sed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked past the window, and crossed the gra.s.sy threshold without knocking, suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the smoothing-iron, as her ill.u.s.trious scholar, amid the loud boiling of the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open; and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and b.u.t.terfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood empty, for he now kept no gardener.

But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appet.i.te, was at all times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.

In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood, standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit Parna.s.sus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he, spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf, in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae majusculae minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day, the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?

My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake which Fraulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is.

She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an auth.o.r.ess of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine; inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of G.o.d--which, in the thirteenth century, the country n.o.bles did as well as princes,--for she lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those va.s.sals whom her husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured; her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous, and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.

It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she, his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba Anomala_ along with him.

The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating, and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give thanks enough.

Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not, like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maisonbouche_ I do not reckon) in his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387 Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.

Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she, it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the n.o.bler parts and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his father.