Translations from the German Part 30

Fixlein's Pet.i.tion was particularly good and striking: it submitted to the Rittmeister four grounds of preference: 1. "He was a native of the parish: his parents and ancestors had already done Hukelum service; therefore he prayed," &c.

2. "The here-doc.u.mented official debts of 135 florins, 41 kreutzers and one halfpenny, the cancelling of which a never-to-be-forgotten testament secured him, he himself could clear, in case he obtained the living, and so hereby give up his claim to the legacy," &c.

_Voluntary Note by me._ It is plain he means to bribe his G.o.dfather, whom the lady's testament has put into a fume. But, gentle reader, blame not without mercy a poor, oppressed, heavy-laden school-man and school-horse for an indelicate insinuation, which truly was never mine.

Consider, Fixlein knew that the Rittmeister was a cormorant towards the poor, as he was a squanderer towards the rich. It may be, too, the Conrector might once or twice have heard, in the Law Courts, of patrons, by whom not indeed the church and churchyard--though these things are articles of commerce in England--so much as the true management of them had been sold, or rather farmed to farming-candidates. I know from Lange,[51] that the Church must support its patron, when he has nothing to live upon: and might not a n.o.bleman, before he actually began begging, be justified in taking a little advance, a fore-payment of his alimentary moneys, from the hands of his pulpit-farmer?--

[51] His _Clerical Law_, p. 551.

3. "He had lately betrothed himself with Fraulein von Thiennette, and given her a piece of gold, as marriage-pledge; and could therefore wed the said Fraulein were he once provided for," &c.

_Voluntary Note by me._ I hold this ground to be the strongest in the whole Pet.i.tion. In the eyes of Herr von Aufhammer, Thiennette's genealogical tree was long since stubbed, disleaved, worm-eaten and full of millepedes: she was his OEconoma, his Castle-Stewardess and Legatess _a Latere_ for his domestics; and with her pretensions for an alms-coffer, was threatening in the end to become a burden to him. His indignant wish that she had been provided for with Fixlein's legacy might now be fulfilled. In a word, if Fixlein become Parson, he will have the third ground to thank for it; not at all the mad fourth....

4. "He had learned with sorrow, that the name of his Shock, which he had purchased from an Emigrant at Leipzig, meant Egidius in German; and that the dog had drawn upon him the displeasure of his Lordship. Far be it from him so to designate the Shock in future; but he would take it as a special grace, if for the dog, which he at present called without any name, his Lordship would be pleased to appoint one himself."

_My Voluntary Note._ The dog then, it seems, to which the n.o.bleman has. .h.i.therto been G.o.dfather, is to receive its name a _second_ time from him!--But how can the famishing gardener's son, whose career never mounted higher than from the school-bench to the school-chair, and who never spoke with polished ladies, except singing, namely in the church, how can he be expected, in fingering such a string, to educe from it any finer tone than the pedantic one? And yet the source of it lies deeper: not the contracted _situation_, but the contracted _eye_, not a favourite science, but a narrow plebeian soul, makes us pedantic, a soul that cannot _measure_ and _separate_ the _concentric_ circles of human knowledge and activity, that confounds the focus of universal human life, by reason of the focal distance, with every two or three converging rays; and that cannot see all, and tolerate all----In short, the true Pedant is the Intolerant.

The Conrector wrote out his pet.i.tion splendidly in five propitious evenings; employed a peculiar ink for the purpose; worked not indeed so long over it as the stupid Manucius over a Latin letter, namely, some months, if Scioppius' word is to be taken; still less so long as another scholar at a Latin epistle, who--truly we have nothing but Morhof's word for it--hatched it during four whole months; inserting his variations, adjectives, feet, with the authorities for his phrases, accurately marked between the lines. Fixlein possessed a more thorough-going genius, and had completely mastered the whole enterprise in sixteen days. While sealing, he thought, as we all do, how this cover was the seed-husk of a great entire Future, the rind of many sweet or bitter fruits, the swathing of his whole after-life.

Heaven bless his cover; but I let you throw me from the Tower of Babel, if he get the parsonage: can't you see, then, that Aufhammer's hands are tied? In spite of all his other faults, or even because of them, he will stand like iron by his word, which he has given so long ago to the Subrector. It were another matter had he been resident at Court; for there, where old German manners still are, no promise is kept; for as, according to Moser, the Ancient Germans kept only such promises as they made in the _forenoon_ (in the afternoon they were all dead-drunk),--so the Court Germans likewise keep no afternoon promise; forenoon ones they would keep if they made any, which, however, cannot possibly happen, as at those hours they are--sleeping.

SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.

_Sermon. School-Exhibition. Splendid Mistake._

The Conrector received his 135 florins, 43 kreutzers, one halfpenny Frankish; but no answer: the dog remained without name, his master without parsonage. Meanwhile the summer pa.s.sed away; and the Dragoon Rittmeister had yet drawn out no pike from the Candidate _breeding-pond_, and thrown him into the _feeding-pond_ of the Hukelum parsonage. It gratified him to be behung with prayers like a Spanish guardian Saint; and he postponed (though determined to prefer the Subrector) granting any one pet.i.tion, till he had seven-and-thirty dyers', b.u.t.tonmakers', tinsmiths' sons, whose pet.i.tions he could at the same time refuse. Grudge not him of Aufhammer this outlengthening of his electorial power! He knows the privileges of rank; feels that a n.o.bleman is like Timoleon, who gained his greatest victories on his birthday, and had nothing more to do than name some squiress, countess, or the like, as his mother. A man, however, who has been exalted to the Peerage, while still a foetus, may with more propriety be likened to the _spinner_, which, contrariwise to all other insects, pa.s.ses from the chrysalis state, and becomes a perfect insect in its mother's womb.--

But to proceed! Fixlein was at present not without cash. It will be the same as if I made a present of it to the reader, when I reveal to him, that of the legacy, which was clearing off old scores, he had still thirty-five florins left to himself, as _allodium_ and pocket-money, wherewith he might purchase whatsoever seemed good to him. And how came he by so large a sum, by so considerable a competence? Simply by this means: Every time he changed a piece of gold, and especially at every payment he received, it had been his custom to throw in, blindly at random, two, three, or four small coins, among the papers of his trunk.

His purpose was to astonish himself one day, when he summed up and took possession of this sleeping capital. And, by Heaven! he reached it too, when on mounting the throne of his Conrectorate, he drew out these funds from among his papers, and applied them to the coronation charges. For the present, he sowed them in again among his waste letters. Foolish Fixlein! I mean, had he not luckily exposed his legacy to jeopardy, having offered it as bounty-money, and luck-penny to the patron, this false clutch of his at the knocker of the Hukelum church-door would certainly have vexed him; but now if he had missed the knocker, he had the luck-penny again, and could be merry.

I now advance a little way in his History, and hit, in the rock of his Life, upon so fine a vein of silver, I mean upon so fine a day, that I must (I believe) content myself even in regard to the twenty-third of Trinity-term, when he preached a vacation sermon in his dear native village, with a brief transitory notice.

In itself the sermon was good and glorious; and the day a rich day of pleasure; but I should really need to have more hours at my disposal than I can steal from May, in which I am at present living and writing; and more strength than wandering through this fine weather has left me for landscape pictures of the same, before I could attempt, with any well-founded hope, to draw out a mathematical estimate of the length and thickness, and the vibrations and accordant relations to each other, of the various strings, which combined together to form for his heart a Music of the Spheres, on this day of Trinity-term, though such a thing would please myself as much as another.... Do not ask me! In my opinion, when a man preaches on Sunday before all the peasants, who had carried him in their arms when a gardener's boy; farther, before his mother, who is leading off her tears through the conduit of her satin m.u.f.f; farther, before his Lordship, whom he can positively command to be blessed; and finally, before his muslin bride, who is already blessed, and changing almost into stone, to find that the same lips can both kiss and preach: in my opinion, I say, when a man effects all this, he has some right to require of any Biographer who would paint his situation, that he--hold his jaw; and of the reader who would sympathise with it, that he open his, and preach himself.----

But what I must _ex officio_ depict, is the day to which this Sunday was but the prelude, the vigil and the whet; I mean the prelude, the vigil and the whet to the _Martini Actus_, or _Martinmas Exhibition_, of his school. On Sunday was the Sermon, on Wednesday the Actus, on Tuesday the Rehearsal. This Tuesday shall now be delineated to the universe.

I count upon it that I shall not be read by mere people of the world alone, to whom a School-Actus cannot truly appear much better, or more interesting, than some Invest.i.ture of a Bishop, or the _opera seria_ of a Frankfort Coronation; but that I likewise have people before me, who have been at schools, and who know how the school-drama of an Actus, and the stage-manager, and the playbill (the Program) thereof are to be estimated, still without overrating their importance.

Before proceeding to the Rehearsal of the _Martini Actus_, I impose upon myself, as dramaturgist of the play, the duty, if not of extracting, at least of recording the Conrector's Letter of Invitation. In this composition he said many things; and (what an author likes so well) made proposals rather than reproaches; interrogatively reminding the public, Whether in regard to the well-known head-breakages of Priscian on the part of the Magnates in Pest and Poland, our school-houses were not the best quarantine and lazar-houses to protect us against infectious _barbarisms_? Moreover, he defended in schools what could be defended (and nothing in the world is sweeter or easier than a defence); and said, Schoolmasters, who not quite justifiably, like certain Courts, spoke nothing, and let nothing be spoken to them but Latin, might plead the Romans in excuse, whose subjects, and whose kings, at least in their epistles and public transactions, were obliged to make use of the Latin tongue. He wondered why only our Greek, and not also our Latin Grammars, were composed in Latin, and put the pregnant question: Whether the Romans, when they taught their little children the Latin tongue, did it in any other than in this same? Thereupon he went over to the Actus, and said what follows, in his own words:

"I am minded to prove, in a subsequent Invitation, that everything which can be said or known about the great founder of the Reformation, the subject of our present Martini Prolusions, has been long ago exhausted, as well by Seckendorf as others. In fact, with regard to Luther's personalities, his table-talk, incomes, journeys, clothes, and so forth, there can now nothing new be brought forward, if at the same time it is to be true. Nevertheless, the field of the Reformation history is, to speak in a figure, by no means wholly cultivated; and it does appear to me as if the inquirer even of the present day might in vain look about for correct intelligence respecting the children, grandchildren and children's children, down to our own times, of this great Reformer; all of whom, however, appertain, in a more remote degree, to the Reformation history, as he himself in a nearer. Thou shalt not perhaps be threshing, said I to myself, altogether empty straw, if, according to thy small ability, thou bring forward and cultivate this neglected branch of History. And so have I ventured, with the last male descendant of Luther, namely, with the Advocate Martin Gottlob Luther, who practised in Dresden, and deceased there in 1759, to make a beginning of a more special Reformation history. My feeble attempt, in regard to this Reformationary Advocate, will be sufficiently rewarded, should it excite to better works on the subject: however, the little which I have succeeded in digging up and collecting with regard to him I here submissively, obediently, and humbly request all friends and patrons of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium to listen to, on the 14th of November, from the mouths of sis well-conditioned perorators. In the first place, shall

"_Gottlieb Spiesgla.s.s_, a Flachsenfinger, endeavour to show, in a Latin oration, that Martin Gottlob Luther was certainly descended of the Luther family. After him strives

"_Friedrich Christian Krabbler_, from Hukelum, in German prose, to appreciate the influence which Martin Gottlob Luther exercised on the then existing Reformation; whereupon, after him, will

"_Daniel Lorenz Stenzinger_ deliver, in Latin verse, an account of Martin Gottlob Luther's lawsuits; embracing the probable merits of Advocates generally, in regard to the Reformation. Which then will give opportunity to

"_Nikol Tobias Pfizman_ to come forward in French, and recount the most important circ.u.mstances of Martin Gottlob Luther's school-years, university-life and riper age. And now, when

"_Andreas Eintarm_ shall have endeavoured, in German verse, to apologise for the possible failings of this representative of the great Luther, will

"_Justus Strobel_, in Latin verse according to ability, sing his uprightness and integrity in the Advocate profession; whereafter I myself shall mount the cathedra, and most humbly thank all the patrons of the Flachsenfingen School, and then farther bring forward those portions in the life of this remarkable man, of which we yet know absolutely nothing, they being spared _Deo volente_ for the speakers of the next _Martini Actus_."

The day before the Actus offered as it were the proof-shot and sample-sheet of the Wednesday. Persons who on account of dress could not be present at the great school-festival, especially ladies, made their appearance on Tuesday, during the six proof-orations. No one can be readier than I to subordinate the proof-Actus to the Wednesday-Actus; and I do anything but need being stimulated suitably to estimate the solemn feast of a School; but on the other hand I am equally convinced that no one, who did not go to the real Actus of Wednesday, could possibly figure anything more splendid than the proof-day preceding; because he could have no object wherewith to compare the pomp in which the Primate of the festival drove in with his triumphal chariot and six--to call the six brethren-speakers coach-horses--next morning in presence of ladies and Councillor gentlemen. Smile away, Fixlein, at this astonishment over thy today's _Ovation_, which is leading on tomorrow's _Triumph_: on thy dissolving countenance quivers happy Self, feeding on these incense-fumes; but a vanity like thine, and that only, which enjoys without comparing or despising, can one tolerate, will one foster. But what flowed over all his heart, like a melting sunbeam over wax, was his mother, who after much persuasion had ventured in her Sunday clothes humbly to place herself quite low down, beside the door of the Prima cla.s.s-room. It were difficult to say who is happier, the mother, beholding how he whom she has borne under her heart can direct such n.o.ble young gentlemen, and hearing how he along with them can talk of these really high things and understand them too;--or the son, who, like some of the heroes of Antiquity, has the felicity of triumphing in the lifetime of his mother. I have never in my writings or doings cast a stone upon the late Burchardt Grossmann, who under the initial letters of the stanzas in his song, "_Brich an, du liebe Morgenrothe_," inserted the letters of his own name; and still less have I ever censured any poor herbwoman for smoothing out her winding-sheet, while still living, and making herself one-twelfth of a dozen of grave-shifts. Nor do I regard the man as wise--though indeed as very clever and pedantic--who can fret his gall-bladder full because every one of us leaf-miners views the leaf whereon he is mining as a park-garden, as a fifth Quarter of the World (so near and rich is it); the leaf-pores as so many Valleys of Tempe, the leaf-skeleton as a Liberty-tree, a Bread-tree and Life-tree, and the dew-drops as the Ocean. We poor day-moths, evening-moths and night-moths, fall universally into the same error, only on different leaves; and whosoever (as I do) laughs at the important airs with which the schoolmaster issues his programs, the dramaturgist his playbills, the cla.s.sical variation-alms-gatherer his alphabetic letters,--does it, if he is wise (as is the case here), with the consciousness of his own _similar_ folly; and laughs in regard to his neighbour, at nothing but mankind and himself.

The mother was not to be detained; she must off, this very night, to Hukelum, to give the Fraulein Thiennette at least some tidings of this glorious business.--

And now the World will bet a hundred to one, that I forthwith take biographical wax, and emboss such a wax-figure cabinet of the Actus itself as shall be single of its kind.

But on Wednesday morning, while the hope-intoxicated Conrector was just about putting on his fine raiment, something knocked.----

It was the well-known servant of the Rittmeister, carrying the Hukelum Presentation for the Subrector _Fuchs_lein in his pocket. To the last-named gentleman he had been sent with this call to the parsonage: but he had distinguished ill betwixt _Sub_ and _Con_rector; and had besides his own good reasons for directing his steps to the latter; for he thought: "Who can it be that gets it, but the parson that preached last Sunday, and that comes from the village, and is engaged to our Fraulein Thiennette, and to whom I brought a clock and a roll of ducats already?" That his Lordship could pa.s.s over his own G.o.dson, never entered the man's head.

Fixlein read the address of the Appointment: "To the Reverend the Parson _Fixlein_ of Hukelum." He naturally enough made the same mistake as the lackey; and broke up the Presentation as his own: and finding moreover in the body of the paper no special mention of persons, but only of a _Schul-unter-befehlslaber_ or School-undergovernor (instead of Subrector), he could not but persist in his error. Before I properly explain why the Rittmeister's Lawyer, the framer of the Presentation, had so designated a Subrector--we two, the reader and myself, will keep an eye for a moment on Fixlein's joyful saltations--on his gratefully-streaming eyes--on his full hands so laden with bounty--on the present of two ducats, which he drops into the hands of the mitre-bearer, as willingly as he will soon drop his own pedagogic office. Could he tell what to think (of the Rittmeister), or to write (to the same), or to table (for the lackey)? Did he not ask tidings of the n.o.ble health of his benefactor over and over, though the servant answered him with all distinctness at the very first? And was not this same man, who belonged to the nose-upturning, shoulder-shrugging, shoulder-knotted, toad-eating species of men, at last so moved by the joy which he had imparted, that he determined on the spot, to bestow his presence on the new clergyman's School-Actus, though no person of quality whatever was to be there? Fixlein, in the first place, sealed his letter of thanks; and courteously invited this messenger of good news to visit him frequently in the Parsonage; and to call this evening in pa.s.sing at his mother's, and give her a lecture for not staying last night, when she might have seen the Presentation from his Lordship arrive today.

The lackey being gone, Fixlein for joy began to grow sceptical--and timorous (wherefore, to prevent filching, he stowed his Presentation securely in his coffer, under keeping of two padlocks); and devout and softened, since he thanked G.o.d without scruple for all good that happened to him, and never wrote this Eternal Name but in pulpit characters and with coloured ink, as the Jewish copyists never wrote it except in ornamental letters and when newly washed;[52]--and deaf also did the parson grow, so that he scarcely heard the soft wooing-hour of the Actus--for a still softer one beside Thiennette, with its rose-bushes and rose-honey, would not leave his thoughts. He who of old, when Fortune made a wry face at him, was wont, like children in their sport at one another, to laugh at her so long till she herself was obliged to begin smiling,--he was now flying as on a huge seesaw higher and higher, quicker and quicker aloft.

[52] Eichhorn's _Einleit. ins A. T._ (Introduction to the Old Testament), vol. ii.

But before the Actus, let us examine the Schadeck Lawyer. _Fixlein_ instead of _Fuchslein_[53] he had written from uncertainty about the spelling of the name; the more naturally as in transcribing the Rittmeisterinn's will, the former had occurred so often. _Von_, this triumphal arch he durst not set up before Fuchslein's new name, because Aufhammer forbade it, considering Hans Fuchslein as a mushroom who had no right to _vons_ and t.i.tles of n.o.bility, for all his patents. In fine, the Presentation-writer was possessed with Campe's[54] whim of Germanising everything, minding little though when Germanised it should cease to be intelligible;--as if a word needed any better act of naturalisation than that which universal intelligibility imparts to it.

In itself it is the same--the rather as all languages, like all men, are cognate, intermarried and intermixed--whether a word was invented by a savage or a foreigner; whether it grew up like moss amid the German forests, or like street-gra.s.s, in the pavement of the Roman forum. The Lawyer, on the other hand, contended that it was different; and accordingly he hid not from any of his clients that _Tagefarth_ (Day-turn) meant _Term_, and that _Appealing_ was _Berufen_ (Becalling).

On this principle he dressed the word _Subrector_ in the new livery of _School-undergovernor_. And this version farther converted the Schoolmaster into Parson: to such a degree does our _civic_ fortune--not our _personal_ well-being, which supports itself on our own internal soil and resources--grow merely on the _drift-mould_ of accidents, connexions, acquaintances, and Heaven or the Devil knows what!--

[53] Both have the same sound. _Fuchslein_ means Foxling, Foxwhelp.--ED.

[54] Campe, a German philologist, who, along with several others of that cla.s.s, has really proposed, as represented in the Text, to subst.i.tute for all Greek or Latin derivatives corresponding German terms of the like import. _Geography_, which may be _Erdbeschreibung_ (Earth-description), was thenceforth to be nothing else; a _Geometer_ became an _Earthmeasurer_, &c. &c.

_School-undergovernor_, instead of _Subrector_, is by no means the happiest example of the system, and seems due rather to the Schadeck Lawyer than to Campe, whom our Author has elsewhere more than once eulogised for his project in similar style.--ED.

By the by, from a Lawyer, at the same time a Country Judge, I should certainly have looked for more sense; I should (I may be mistaken) have presumed he knew that the _Acts_ or Reports, which in former times (see Hoffmann's _German or un-German Law-practice_) were written in Latin, as before the times of Joseph the Hungarian,--are now, if we may say so without offence, perhaps written fully more in the German dialect than in the Latin; and in support of this opinion, I can point to whole lines of German language, to be found in these Imperial-Court-Confessions.

However, I will not believe that the Jurist is endeavouring, because Imhofer declares the Roman tongue to be the mother tongue in the other world, to disengage himself from a language, by means of which, like the Roman _Eagle_, or later, like the Roman _Fish-heron_ (Pope), he has clutched such abundant booty in his talons.----

Toll, toll your bell for the Actus; stream in, in to the ceremony: who cares for it? Neither I nor the Ex-Conrector. The six pigmy Ciceros will in vain set forth before us in sumptuous dress their thoughts and bodies. The draught-wind of Chance has blown away from the Actus its powder-nimbus of glory; and the Conrector that was has discovered how small a matter a cathedra is, and how great a one a pulpit: "I should not have thought," thought he now, "when I became Conrector, that there could he anything grander, I mean a Parson." Man, behind his everlasting blind, which he only colours differently, and makes no thinner, carries his pride with him from one step to another; and, on the higher step, blames only the pride of the lower.

The best of the Actus was, that the Regiments-Quartermaster, and Master Butcher, Steinberg, attended there, embaled in a long woollen s.h.a.g.

During the solemnity, the Subrector Hans von Fuchslein cast several gratified and inquiring glances on the Schadeck servant, who did not once look at him: Hans would have staked his head, that after the Actus, the fellow would wait upon him. When at last the s.e.xtuple c.o.c.kerel-brood had on their dunghill done crowing, that is to say, had perorated, the scholastic c.o.c.ker, over whom a higher banner was now waving, himself came upon the stage; and delivered to the School-Inspectorships, to the Subrectorship, to the Guardianship and the Lackeyship, his most grateful thanks for their attendance; shortly announcing to them at the same time, "that Providence had now called him from his post to another; and committed to him, unworthy as he was, the cure of souls in the Hukelum parish, as well as in the Schadeck chapel of ease."

This little address, to appearance, well-nigh blew up the then Subrector Hans von Fuchslein from his chair; and his face looked of a mingled colour, like red bole, green chalk, tinsel-yellow and _vomiss.e.m.e.nt de la reine_.

The tall Quartermaster erected himself considerably in his s.h.a.g, and hummed loud enough in happy forgetfulness: "The d.i.c.kens!--Parson?"----