Titan: A Romance Volume I Part 4

Now, however, I put an entirely new face upon matters, inasmuch as, in the first place, I draw a marked line in this work between history and digression, a few cases of dispensation excepted; secondly, inasmuch as the liberties which I had taken in my former works are in the present reduced to a prescriptive right and confirmed into a servitude, the reader surrenders at once when he knows, that, after a volume full of Jubilee-periods, one is to follow which is entirely full of nothing but honey-months. I take shame to myself, when I remember how I once, in former works, stood with the beggar's staff before the reader, and begged for the privilege of digression, when I might, after all,--as I do here,--have extorted the loan, as one has to demand of women, as a matter of course, not only the _tribute_ as _alms_, but also the _don gratuit_ as _quarterly a.s.sessment_. So does not merely the cultivated Regent at the Diet, but even the rude Arab, who extorts from the traveller, besides the cash, a deed of gift for the same.

I come now to the Privy-Legation's-Counsellor, Von Hafenreffer, who is the subject of my promised _expose of fact_.

It must have been formerly learned from the 45th Dog-Post-Day, who governs Flachsenfingen, namely, my revered father. This striking promotion of mine was, at the bottom, more a step than a spring; for I was, previously, no less than a Jurist, consequently the germ or bud of an embryo Doctor _utriusque_, and consequently a n.o.bleman, since in the Doctor the whole sp.a.w.n and yolk of the Knight lies; therefore the former, as well as the latter, when anything chances by, lives upon his saddle or stirrup, although less in a robber's castle than in a robber's chamber; I have, therefore, since the preferment, changed less myself than my castle of residence;--the paternal seat in Flachsenfingen is at present my own.

I care not now to eat my sugar-cake at court with sin,--although one earns sugar-cake and manna more comfortably than ship-bread,--but I represent, in order to make a profit upon my adventure, the whole Flachsenfingen Department of Foreign Affairs at home here in the castle, together with the requisite deciphering chancery. This, then, is what we shall do: we have a Procurator in Vienna, two Residents in five Imperial cities, a Secretary of the Comitia in Ratisbon under the Cross-Bench,[21] three Chancery-clerks of the circle, and an Envoye-Plenipotentiary at a well-known and considerable court not far from Hohenfliess, who is no other than the aforementioned Mr. Feudal Provost Von Hafenreffer. To the latter my father has even advanced a complete silver-service, which we lend him, till he shall have received his recall, because it is for our own interest that a Flachsenfingen amba.s.sador should, while abroad, do extraordinary honor, by his extravagance, to the princely hat or coronet of Flachsenfingen.

Now it is no joke to stand on such a post as this of mine; the whole legation-writing-and-reading company write to me under frank, the _chiffre ba.n.a.l_ and the _chiffre dechiffrant_ are in my hands, and I understand, as it seems to me, the whole mess. It is unutterable, all that I thus learn: it could not be read by men nor drawn by horses, if I were disposed to hatch, biographically, and feed and reel off the whole silk-worm seed of novels, which the corps of amba.s.sadors send me every post-day in closely-sealed packages. Yes (to use another metaphor), the biographical timber which my float-inspection launches for me from up above,--now into the Elbe, now into the Saale, now into the Danube,--stands already so high before me in the ship-yard, that I could not use it up, supposing I drove on the aesthetical building of my biographical fools'-ships, masquerade-b.a.l.l.s, and enchanted castles, day and night, year out and year in, and never danced, nor rode, nor spoke, nor sneezed again in my life....

Verily, whenever (as I often do) I weigh my ovary as an author against many another sp.a.w.n, I ask out-right, with a certain chagrin, why a man should come to bear so great a one, who cannot give it forth from himself for want of time and place, while another hardly lays and hatches a wind-egg. If I could despatch a picket from my legation-division to knightly book-makers with its official reports, would they not gladly exchange ruins for castles, and subterranean cloister-pa.s.sages for corridors, and spirits for bodies? whereas, now, for want of the official reports of a picket, wenches must represent women of the world, veimers[22] ministers of justice, as well as jesters pages, castle-chaplains court-preachers, and robber-barons the Pointeurs.[23]

I come back to my amba.s.sador, Von Hafenreffer. At the above-mentioned distinguished court sits this excellent gentleman, and supplies me--without neglecting other duties--from month to month with as many personalities of my Hohenfliess hero as he can, by means of his legation-soothsayers or clairvoyants, ferret out;--the smallest trifles are with him weighty enough for a despatch. Certainly a quite different way of thinking from that of other amba.s.sadors, who in their reports make room only for events which afterwards are to make their entrance into the Universal History! Hafenreffer has in every _cul de sac_, servant's chamber and attic, in every chimney and tavern, his opera-gla.s.s of a spy, who often, in order to discover one of my hero's virtues, takes upon himself ten sins. Of course, with such a hand-and-horse service of good luck, no one of us can wonder,--that is, I mean, with such a cistern-wheel turned for me by Fortune herself,--with such thieves' thumbs affixed to my own writing-fingers,--with such silhouetteurs of a hero, who make everything except color,--in short, with such an extraordinary concatenation of circ.u.mstances, or Montgolfiers,[24]--it cannot of course be anything but just what is expected, if the man who is lifted by them should, on his mountain height up there, bring together and afterward send down a work which will be freely translated after the last day (for it deserves as much) on the Sun, on Ura.n.u.s and Sirius, and for which even the lucky quill-sc.r.a.per who nibbed the pens for it, and the compositor who prints the errata, will take more airs upon themselves than the author himself, and upon which neither the swift scythe nor the tardy _tooth_ of time,--especially since the latter can, if requisite, be cut in two by the tooth-saw of the critical file,--shall be able to make any impression. And when to such eminent advantages the author adds that of humility, then there is no longer any one to be compared with him; but unhappily every nature holds itself,--as Dr. Crusius does the world,--not for the best, indeed, but still as very good.

The present _t.i.tan_ enjoys, besides, the further advantage that I at this moment inhabit and grace the paternal court, and accordingly, as draughtsman, have certain sins near and bright before my eyes in a position most favorable for observation, of which at least Vanity, Libertinism, and Idleness will stay and sit for their likeness; for fate has sowed these mushrooms and mosses as high as possible among the upper cla.s.ses, because in the lower and broader they would have spread too much, and sucked them dry,--which seems to be the pattern of that same foresight by which ships always have their a.s.safoetida which they bring from Persia hanging overhead on the mast, in order that its stench may not contaminate the freight on deck. Moreover, I have up here in the court all the new fashions already around me for my observation and contempt, before they have been, down below there, only traduced, not to say commended,--e. g. the fine fashion of the Parisians, that women shall by a slight tuck in their dress show their calves, which they do in Paris, in order to let it be seen that they are not gentlemen, who, as is well known, walk on wooden legs,--this fashion will to-morrow or day after to-morrow (for it has arrived on an individual lady) be certainly introduced. But the females of Flachsenfingen imitate this fashion on quite another ground,--for gentlemen among us have no defect,--and that is, as a way of proving that they are human beings, and not apes (to say nothing less), since, according to Camper and others, man alone has calves. The same proof was adduced ten years ago, only on higher grounds. For since, according to Haller, man is distinguished from monkey in no other respect than by the possession of a posterior, the female officers of the crown, the dressing-maids, sought as much as possible to magnify in the persons of their mistresses this characteristic of their s.e.x by art,--by the so-called _cul de Paris_; and, with such a penultimate of the ultimate, it became then a jest and an amus.e.m.e.nt to distinguish at a distance of two hundred paces a woman of the world from her female ape,--a thing which now many who know their Buffon by heart will venture to do, when they are no nearer to her than too near.

Similar biographical Denunciantes and Familiars I maintain in several of the German cities;--my honored father pays for them;--in most places one, but in Leipsic two, in Dresden three, in Berlin six, in Vienna as many in every quarter of the city. Machines of such a nature, so much like perspective-gla.s.ses, whereby one can survey from his bed all that is going on in the street below, of course make it easy for an author, from behind his inkstand, to see clear down into dark household operations going on in some by-lane, hidden among buildings twenty miles distant. Therefore, the singular case may happen to me every week, that a staid, quiet man, whom n.o.body knows but his barber, and whose course of life is like a dark, unfrequented _cul de sac_, but whom one of my envoys and spies secretly follows, with a biographical concave mirror, which casts an image of the man, waistcoat, breeches, walk, and all, into my study, situated at a distance of thirty miles,--the case may occur to me, I say, that such a secluded man shall accidentally step up to the counter of the bookseller, and in my work, which lies there smoking hot from the oven, shall find himself, with all his hair, b.u.t.tons, buckles, and warts, as clearly pictured out on the three hundred and seventy-first page, as the impressions of _Indian_ plants which are found on rocks in France. That, however, is no matter.

People, on the other hand, who live at the same place with me, as the people of Hof formerly did, come off well; for I keep no amba.s.sadors near me.

But this very advantage of getting my anecdotes, not out of my head, but from despatches, obliges me to take more pains in putting them into cipher, than others would have in dressing them up or thinking them out.

No less a miracle than that which bars up and hides the masonic mystery, and the invisible church, and the invisible lodge, has seemed thus far to avert the discovery of the _true_ names of my histories, and, indeed, with such success, that of all the ma.n.u.scripts which have hitherto been despatched to the publishers, filled with conjectures on the subject, not one has smelt the mouse,--and truly fortunate for the world; for so soon, e. g., as one person shall have nosed out the names of the first volumes of t.i.tan, disguised as they have been in the best hieroglyphic chancery offices, that moment I upset my inkstand, and publish no more.

Nothing is to be inferred from the names which I use, for I press into the service G.o.d-parents for my heroes in the most singular ways. Have I not, e. g., often of an evening, during the marching and countermarching of the German armies, who made their crusades to the holy sepulchre of freedom, gone up and down through the lanes of the camp, with my writing-tablets in my hands, and caught and entered the names of the privates,--which, just before bedtime, were called out aloud, like the names of saints,--just as they fell, in order to distribute them again among my biographical people? And has not merit been promoted thereby, and many a common soldier risen to be a n.o.bleman fit for table and tournament, and have not provost-marshals been raised to ministers of justice, and red-cloaks to _patribus purpuratis_? And did ever a c.o.c.k crow in all the army after this corps of observation slinking round mobilized on two legs?

For authors who wish at the same time to narrate and disguise true anecdotes, I am, perhaps, on the whole, a model and file-leader. I have studied and imitated longer than other historical inquirers those little innocent stretching and wrenching processes which can make a history unrecognizable to the very hero of the same, and I fancy I know how one is to make good biographies of princes, protocols of high traitors, legends of saints, and auto-biographies; no stronger touches decide the matter than those slight ones, by which Peter of Cortona (or Beretino) in the presence of Ferdinand of Tuscany transformed a weeping child into a laughing one, and the reverse.

Voltaire demands more than once, as he always does,--for he gave mankind, like an army, every order of march three times, and repeated himself and everything else most indefatigably,--that the historian shall arrange his history after the law-table of the drama, to a dramatic focal point. It is, however, one of the first dramatic rules which Lessing, Aristotle, and the Greek models give us, that the dramatic poet must lend to every historical circ.u.mstance which he treats all that is favorable to the poetic illusion, as well as keep clear of everything opposite, and that he must never sacrifice beauty to truth, but the reverse. Voltaire gave, as is well known, not only the easy rule, but the hard model also; and this great theatre poet of the world's theatre, in his _benefit_ dramas of Peter and Charles, never stuck to the truth where he was sure he could attain sooner to illusion.

And that is properly the genuine romantic history corresponding to the historical romance. It is not for me, but for others,--namely, the Provost and the Secretaries of Legation,--to decide how far I have treated a true history illusorily. It is a misfortune that the true history of my hero can hardly ever see the light; otherwise the justice might be done me that connoisseurs would confront my poetical deviations with the truth, and thereafter give each of us more easily his own, as well the truth as myself. But this reward is what all royal historiographers and scandalous chroniclers must resign _nolens volens_, because the true history never appears in conjunction with their works.

But in the composition of a history an author must also keep a sharp look-out upon this point, that it shall not only hit and betray no real persons, but also no false ones, and in fact n.o.body at all. Before I, e.

g., choose a name for a bad prince, I must look through the genealogical index of all governing and governed families, in order not to use a name which some person or other already bears; thus, in Otaheite, even the words which sound like the name of the king are abolished after his coronation, and supplied by others. Now, as I was formerly acquainted with no living courts at all, I was not in a situation, when preparing the battle-pieces and night-pieces which I painted of the Cabals, the Egoism, and the Libertinism of biographical courts, to succeed in skilfully avoiding every resemblance to real ones; yes, for such an idiot as I, it was a miserable help, even, to be often laying Machiavelli open before me, in order, with the a.s.sistance of the French history, by painting from the two, to turn off the edge of the application at least upon countries in which no Frenchman or Italian ever had the influence that is generally attributed to both of them upon other Germans; just as Herder, in opposition to those naturalists who derive certain misshapen tribes of men from a half-parentage of apes, makes the very good remark that most of the resemblances to apes--the retreating skull of the Calmucks, the prominent ears of the Pevas, the slender hands in Carolina--appear just in those countries where there are no apes at all. Formerly, then, as was said, striking unlikenesses I could not succeed in hitting; now, on the contrary, every court around which my legation-flotilla coasts is well known to me, and therefore secure from accidental resemblances, particularly every one which I describe,--that of Flachsenfingen, that of Hohenfliess, &c. The theatrical mask which I have on in my works is not the mask of the Greek comedian, which was embossed after the face of the individual satirized,[25] but the mask of Nero, which, when he acted a G.o.ddess on the stage, looked like his mistress,[26] and when he acted a G.o.d, like himself.

Enough! This digressive introductory programme has been somewhat long, but the Jubilee-period was so, too: the longer the St. John's day of a country, the longer its St. Thomas's night. And now let us dance along together into the book,--into this free ball of the world,--I first as leader in the dance, and then the readers as hop-dancers after me; so that, amidst the sounding baptismal and funeral bells in the Chinese house of this world-building,--welcomed by the singing-school of the muses,--serenaded from on high by the guitar of Phoebus,--we may dance gayly from Tome to Tome, from Cycle to Cycle, from one digression to another, from one dash to another,--till either the work comes to an end, or the workman, or everybody!

FOOTNOTES:

[21] _Querbank_,--Bench for Protestant Bishops in the Germanic Diet.

[22] _Veimer_,--old Westphalian judges.

[23] Tellers in faro-banks.

[24] The inventor of the balloon.--TR.

[25] Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie, etc. de Dubois, Tom. I.

Sect. 42.

[26] Sueton. Nero.

SECOND JUBILEE.

THE TWO BIOGRAPHICAL COURTS.--THE HERDSMAN'S HUT.--THE FLYING.--THE SALE OF HAIR.--THE DANGEROUS BIRD-POLE.--A STORM LOCKED UP IN A COACH.--LOW MOUNTAIN-MUSIC.--THE LOVING CHILD.--MR. VON FALTERLE FROM VIENNA.--THE TORTURE-SOUPe.--THE SHATTERED HEART.--WERTHER WITHOUT BEARD, BUT WITH A SHOT.--THE RECONCILIATION.

10. CYCLE.

In the bloom of youthful powers, and the brightness of youthful prospects, the Count, between his two companions, flew back through the full, glowing Milan, where the ear and the cl.u.s.ter and the olive often ripen together on the same clod of earth. The very name of Milan (Mayland) opened to him a whole spring, because, like myself, in all things which belong to May--in May-flowers, May-chafers, even May b.u.t.ter--he found, when a child, as much enchantment as in childhood itself. Add to this, that he was on horseback; the saddle was with him a princely seat of the blest, while a saddle-room was a Ratisbon bench of counts, and every nag his Pegasus. While on the island, and during that mental and bodily exhaustion in which the soul loves better to frequent clare-obscure and pastoral worlds, than hot, dusty military- and fencing-schools, all antic.i.p.ation of the coming riddles and conflicts of his life had been repulsive to him; but now, with his heart full of the glow of travel and the blood of spring, he stretched out his young arms no less for a foe than for a female friend, as if thirsting for a double conquest.

The farther the island receded, so much the more did the magic-smoke around the nocturnal apparition sink to the ground, and leave behind in full view merely an inexplicable juggler. Now for the first time he revealed the ghost-story to his companions. Schoppe and Augusti shook their heads thoughtfully, but each thought of something different;--the Librarian sought a _physical_ solution of the acoustic and optical illusion; the Lector sought a _political_ one: he could not at all comprehend what the stage-manager of this grave-digger's scene specially meant by it all.

This one comfort the Librarian held to, that Alban on his birthday was directed to pay a visit to the heart without a breast, which visit he could just forego, and so make the seer out to be a myops and a liar.

"Would to Heaven," said he, "an Ezekiel would just prophesy to me that I should bring him to the gallows! I would not do it for any money, but I would, without mercy, make it fatal, not to his neck, but to his credit and his brains." To his incredulous father, also, Albano wrote, during the journey, not without a blush, the incredible history; for he had too few years over his head, and too much energy and daring, to love reserve in himself or others. Only weak, caterpillar- and hedgehog-like souls curl and crumple up into themselves at every touch: under the free brain beats gladly a free heart.

At last, when sunny mountains and shady forests enough, like days and nights that have been lived through, had been left behind them, they approached the goal of their long riding-ground, full of countries, and now the Princ.i.p.ality of _Hohenfliess_ lay only one princ.i.p.ality distant from them. This second princ.i.p.ality, which was next-door neighbor to the first, and which by breaking through the walls might easily have been merged with it into one common political structure, was called, as is known to geographical readers, _Haarhaar_. The Lector told the Librarian, as they approached the armorial and boundary stones, that the two courts looked upon each other almost as deadly foes; not so much because they were _diplomatic_ relatives--although it is true that, among princes, uncle, cousin, brother, signify no more than brother-in-law applied to postilions, or father and mother to the old folks among the Brandenburghers--as because they were really relatives, and each other's heirs. It would cost me too much room, if I were disposed to set before the reader the family-trees of the two courts,--which were their Upas-trees and Dragon-trees,--with all their heraldic leaves, water-shoots, and lichens; the result must content him, namely, that Hohenfliess, land and people, would fall to the princ.i.p.ality of Haarhaar, in case the hereditary prince, Luigi, the last hollow shoot and sapling of the male stock of Hohenfliess, were to wither away. What hordes of Venetian Lion-heads Haarhaar pours into the land of future inheritance, who are to devour nothing there but learned advertis.e.m.e.nts and placards, and what knavish bands of political mechanics it colonizes there, as in a sort of Botany Bay, cannot be told for want of time. And yet Haarhaar again, on the other hand, is so generous as to desire nothing more heartily than to see the financial estate of Hohenfliess--its business, agriculture, silk manufactures, and breed of horses--in the highest bloom, and to hate and curse in the highest degree all public extravagance, that enervation of the great intercostal-nerve (money), as the mightiest canonical impediment to population. "The Regent," says the truly philanthropic Prince of Haarhaar, "is the chief shepherd, not the butcher, of the state: not even the wool-shears should he take into his hands so often as the shepherd's-flute; not of the _energies_ and _matrimonial prospects_ of others is our cousin (Luigi) master, but of his own, these he must ruin!"

As they rode into the territory of Hohenfliess, they might have made an excursion to Blumenbuhl,[27] which lies aside from Pest.i.tz, and taken a look, as it were, at the nursery of Albano (Isola Bella being his cradle), had not the latter felt a burning hunger and thirst for the city, and a dread like hydrophobia of a second leave-taking, which besides only confuses the clear echo of the first. His journey, the conversation of his father, the pictures of the conjurer, the nearness of the academy, had so ruffled up our bird roc's wing-feathers, which at his age are always too long as the steering tail-feathers are too short, that they would only have been sprained in the confinement of Blumenbuhl. By Heavens! he longed to be something in the state or the world; for he felt a deadly disgust towards that narcotic waste of high life through whose poppy-garden of pleasure men stagger about, sleepy and drunken, till they fall down in a twofold lameness.

It may not have been remembered by the readers of the first Jubilee, because it was in a note, that Albano had never yet been permitted to go to Pest.i.tz, and on very good grounds indeed, which are known, however, to the Knight only, but not to me. This long closing of the city-gates against him only made him the more eager to enter them. And now they stood with their horses upon a broad eminence, whence they saw the church-towers of Pest.i.tz before them in the west, and, if they turned round, the tower of Blumenbuhl below them to the east; from the one and from the other came floating to them a noonday hum: Albano heard his future and his past sounding together. He looked down into the village, and up at a neat little red house on a neighboring mountain, which gleamed after him, like a bright pictured urn of long-extinguished days.

He sighed; he looked over the far building-ground of his future life, and now with loosened rein dashed onward toward the towers of the Linden-city, as towards the palms of his race-ground.

But the neat little house played its antics before him like a red shadow. For, ah! had he not once in that herdsman's hut spent a dreamy day, full of adventures, and that, too, in the very season of childhood, when the soul, on the rainbow-bridge of fancy, glides along, dry-shod, over the walls and ditches of this lower earth? We will now go back with him into this lovely day, this childhood's eve of life's festival, and become acquainted with those earlier hours, which sent back to him so sweetly from this herdsman's hut the Ranz des Vaches of youth.

11. CYCLE.

It was, then, on a magnificent St. James's day--and likewise on the birthday of the Provincial Director, Wehrfritz, who, however, had not received the t.i.tle yet--that this same director--that was to be--had his chariot trundled out in the morning to ride to Pest.i.tz, and see the Minister, and, as Factor of the Province, convert the _flail_ of the state, by way of experiment, into a _drill-plough_. He was a brisk, bustling man, to whom a day of furlough was longer than a day of drill to others, and to whom nothing made time pa.s.s heavily but pastime. "In the evening, however," he said to himself, "I'll make a good day of it, for it happens to be my birthday." His birthday present was to consist in making one; he proposed, namely, to bring home little Albano an Oesterlein's harpsichord out of his own purse,--little as there was in it,--and a music-master, into the bargain, at the desire of Don Gaspard.

But why not, at the outset, explain all this in the clearest manner to the reader?

Don Gaspard, then, in revising a scheme of education for Albano, had chosen that more attention should be paid to his bodily health than to mental superfetation; he thought the tree of knowledge should be grafted with the tree of life. Ah! whoever sacrifices health to wisdom has generally sacrificed wisdom too, and only _inborn_ not _acquired_ sickliness is profitable to head and heart. Accordingly, Albano had not to lug along, bending under the weight, the many-volumed encyclopaedia of all sciences in his book-straps, but merely grammars. That is to say, the rector of the place,--named Wehmeier, better known by the t.i.tle of Band-box-master,--after schooling the village youth for the usual number of hours, was accustomed to seek his fairest _Struve's spare hours_, his _Otia_ and _Noctes Hagianae_, in teaching Albano, and driving into the mill-wheel axle of the everlastingly active boy--impelled by internal streams--alphabetic pins,--so as to make it the barrel of a speech-organ. Of course, however, Zesara soon wished to move something heavier than the key-board of languages; thus, for example, the language-organ barrel became, in a proper sense, the barrel of a hand-organ. For whole hours, without any special knowledge of counterpoint, would he practise on the parish organ (he knew neither note nor key, and stood hard, all through the piece, on the thundering pedal), trying his hand at the most horrible discords, before which the Enharmonics of all Piccinists must be struck dumb, only to bury himself so much the longer and deeper in the accidental prize of a chord. So, also, did his soul, full of sap, work off its energy in leaf-buds, as it were, and shoots and runners, by making pictures, clay statuary, sun-dials, and designs of all sorts, and even in the juristical rockery of his foster-father, for example, in Fabri's State Chancery, it sent its thirsty roots around and out over the dry leaves, as plants do often in herbariums. O, how he pined for lessons and teachers vaguely dreamed of (just as in childhood he had aspired from octavos to quartos, from quarto to folio, from folio even to a book as large as the world, which would be the world itself)! But so much the better! only hunger digests, only love impregnates; the sigh of longing alone is the animating _aura seminalis_ to the Orpheus egg of knowledge. This you do not consider, you flying teachers, who give children the draught earlier than the thirst; you who, like some florists, insert into the split stock of the flowers ready-made lack-dyes, and put foreign musk into their cups, instead of simply giving them morning sun and flower-soil,--and who grant young souls no quiet hours, but bustle round them during the dusting period of their blooming vine, against all the rules of the vine-dressers, with your hoeing and your dunging and your clipping. O, can you ever, when you thus prematurely force them, with their unripe organs, into the great realm of truths and beauties, just as we all, alas! with our dark senses, creep into lovely Nature, and blunt ourselves to the perception of her beauty,--can you ever, in any way, make good to them the great year which they would have lived to see, had they, growing up like the new-created Adam, been able to turn round with their open, thirsty senses, in the glorious universe of spirits? Hence it is that your _eleves_ so nearly resemble the foot-paths, which in spring grow green first of all, but at a later period wind along yellow and hard-trodden through the blooming meadows.

Wehrfritz, as he stood on the carriage-steps and turned his face towards him, repeated his charge to have an oversight of the young Count, and made the mark ["with care"] with which merchants commend valuable boxes of goods to the post, strong and thick upon him: he loved the fiery child as his own (he had only one, and that not a son); the Knight had confidence in him, and, to justify it, since the point of honor was the centre of gravity and pole of all his motions, he would, without hesitation, if the boy, for instance, should break his head, cut his own off; and finally Albano must stand a remarkably good examination at evening before the new teacher from the city.

Albina von Wehrfritz, the spouse, promised everything in the name of all that was sacred; she might have compared herself to the Evangelists Mark and John, because her impetuous husband quite often represented the creatures who are pictured as the companions of the two saints, those king-beasts, the lion and the eagle, just as many another wife, in reference to her companion, may be compared with Luke, and mine with Matthew.[28] Besides, she had bespoken for the evening a little family feast, full of sportive, party-colored ephemerons of joy, and by great good luck already, some days before, the diploma had come in which installed our Wehrfritz as Provincial Director, and which had been laid up against this day as a birthday christening present.

But hardly had Wehrfritz got beyond the castle garden when Albano stepped forth with his project, and announced his intention of sitting out the whole holiday up there in the solitary little shooting-house; for he loved to play alone, and an elderly guest was pleasanter to him than a boy to play with. Women are like Father Lodoli, who (according to Lambert's day-book) shunned nothing so much as the little word, Yes; at least, they do not say it till after, No. The foster-mother (I will, however, in future, cut off from her and from the foster-sister, Rabette, that annoying _foster_) said, without thinking, No, although she knew that she had never yet carried one through against the stubborn little fellow. Then she borrowed very good dehortations from the will and pleasure of the Provincial Director, and bade him consider,--then the red-cheeked, good-natured Rabette took her brother's part, and pleaded for him, without knowing why,--then Albina protested at least he should not expect his dinner to be sent to him on the mountain,--then he marched out of the yard.... So have I often stood by and watched how the female elbows and knuckles, during the stemming of a strong opposition, gradually, before my eyes, became gristle, and bent up. Only in the presence of Wehrfritz had Albina strength enough for a long No.

12. CYCLE.

Our hero had pa.s.sed over from those childish years in which Hercules strangled the serpents, into the years of confirmation, when he warmed them under his waistcoat, to behead them again in later years.

Exultingly did his new and old Adam--they flew side by side--flap their wings out there under a blue heaven which had absolutely no anchoring ground. What cared he for meal-time? All children before and during a journey carry no stomach under their wings, just as that of the b.u.t.terfly shrinks up when his wings are spread. The oft-mentioned herdsman's hut, or little shooting-house, was nothing less than a shooting-house with a sentry-box, for a pensioned soldier's wife, with a shooting-stand in the lower story and a summer-house chamber in the upper, wherein old Wehrfritz every summer meant to have a rural party and a bird shooting, but never had it, because the poor man dismasted and unrigged himself in his work-chamber as others do in their dining-room. For, although the state entices its servants like dogs for the tenth time, only to cudgel them off again for the eleventh, and although Wehrfritz every a.s.size day forswore all state business and earnings,--because an honest man like him finds always in the body politic as much to restore as in the antique statues of which only the stone _drapery_ remains,--nevertheless, he knew no softer couch and feather-bed to rest on, than a still higher bench of oars, and he was just now making every exertion to be Provincial Director.

The German courts will have their own thoughts on the subject when I offer them the following boyish idyl. My black-eyed shepherd stormed the herdsman's mountain fortification, and received from the soldier's wife the door-key to the white and green summer cabinet. By Heavens! when all eastern and western window-shutters and windows were flung open, and the wind stole fluttering through the papers and cooling through the sweltry chamber, and when, outside, heaven and earth stood round about the windows and looked in beckoning,--when Albano beheld, under the window toward the east, the deep broad valley with the leaping, stony brook, on which all the glimmering disks of light which, like pebbles, the sun shot aslant, glanced up the mountain side,--when at the western window he saw, behind hills and woods, the arc of the sky, the mountain of the Linden-city, that slept like a coiled-up giant on the earth,--when he placed himself at one window after another, and said, "How magnificent!"

then his raptures in the chamber grew at last so exalted, that he must needs go forth, in order, out of doors, to exalt them still higher.