Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; / or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Marriage of Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkaes, Parish Advocate in the Burgh of Kuhschnappel.

by Jean Paul

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM.

A sky of glorious and sublime beauty was spread out above this earth; a rainbow stood in the east, like the circle of eternity: a storm, with broken wings, passed thundering, as if weary, along by the lightning conductors, and away through the glowing gate of Eden in the west; the evening sun gazed after the storm with a brightness tender as if it shone through tears, resting its glance upon the great triumphal arch of Nature. All enraptured with the loveliness of the scene, I closed my eyes, and seeing nothing, save the sun shining warm and glowing through my lids, listened to the thunder as it died away in the far distance. And at length the mists of sleep sank down into my soul, and shrouded all the spring in folds of grey; but soon there came luminous bands of brightness piercing through the mist, and by-and-by shone many-tinted lines of beauty, and ere long the dark face of my sleep was painted with the brilliant pictures of the world of dreams.

And then I thought that I was standing in the second world, and all about me a dim green grassy plain, which, in the distance, merged into brighter flowers, and woods of glowing red, and hills so clear that you could see the lodes of gold within them. Beyond these crystal hills there glowed a bright rose dawn of morning, with dewy rainbows arching it all over. All the shining woods were sprent with suns (where earthly forests would have gleamed with drops of dew); while all the flowers were draped with nebulæ, as earthly flowers are hung with gossamer. At times the meadows shook, as waves of motion passed quivering over them—but this was not because the zephyrs bent the grasses in their play—it was that passing souls brushed them with unseen wings. I was invisible in this second world, for there this shell of ours is but a little shroud, a tiny fleck of fog not yet condensed.

And on the brink of this, the second world, reposed the holy Virgin near her Son; and she was looking downward to our earth, there as it floated dwarfed and far beneath, in its pale, feeble spring-time, on the mighty face of the Ocean of Death. And every wave was tossing it at will, and its dim light was nothing but the shadow of a shadow. Then Mary’s heart beat with a yearning pulse, when she beheld the old beloved world, and all her soul grew tender, and she said, with brightening glance, “Oh, Son! this heart of mine is full of longing, and mine eyes with tears, for all these my beloved human friends! Raise the earth near us, that I once more may look into the eyes of mine own race, my brothers, and my sisters. Ah! my tears will fall when I behold the living once again.”

But Christ replied, “The earth is but a dream of many dreams; and thou must sleep to see these dreams.”

And Mary answered, “I will gladly sleep that I may dream of man.” And then Christ said, “Say what the dream shall show thee.”

“Oh beloved! I would the dream would show me mankind’s love. Love such as hearts which meet once more in bliss after long painful parting only know.”

And as she spake it, lo! the angel of Death stood close behind her, and with closing eyes she sank upon his bosom, which was cold as polar ice. And then the little earth rose quivering up, but as it neared it paled and narrowed, and grew more dim and small. The clouds about it parted, and the cleft mists gave to view the little night in which it lay, and from a sleeping brook a star or two of the second world were mirrored back. And all the children lay sleeping on the earth, and all were smiling—for they had seen Mary appear to them as they slept, in semblance of a mother. But, in the night, stood one unhappy being, the power of outward grief almost gone from her, except in sighs which tore her breaking heart. Even her very tears had ceased to flow. Oh! gaze no more, sad soul, towards the west, where stands the house of mourning all behung with funeral crape; nor to the east, upon the grave and house of death. For this one day, turn thy sad gaze away from that drear charnel house where the loved corpse is laid, so that the cool night breeze may fan and wake him from his sleep earlier than if he were shut up within the narrow grave! Yet, no! bereaved one, gaze thy fill on thy beloved one while he still is here, and ere he falls to dust—and steep thy heart deep in the eternal woe.

As then an echo in the lone churchyard began to talk in faint and murmuring tones, repeating the notes of the low-voiced funeral hymn that rose within the house of mourning; and this after-song, floating half-heard in air—as though the dead were chanting low—tore all her heart in twain; and then her tears found vent and flowed anew, and wild with sorrow she raised her voice and cried, “For ever silent! oh my love, my love! Callest thou me once more? oh, speak again—but once—only this once, once more, to me whom thou hast left for ever! Ah, no! nothing but silence; no sound except the echo stirring among the graves. All the poor dead lie deaf beneath, and not a tone comes from the broken heart.”

But when the mourning hymn ceased of a sudden, and the dying echo from the graves sung faintly on alone, a tremor seized her, and her very life shook in the balance; for the echo came nearer and nearer, and from out the night one of the dead came close. And he stretched forth his pale and shadowy hand and took her own, saying, “My darling, why is it that you weep? Where have we been so long? for I have been dreaming that I had lost you!” But they had not lost each other. From Mary’s closed lids there fell some happy tears, and ere her son could wipe those tears away, the earth had sunk back to its place again—and on its face this happy pair, restored to one another, and in bliss.

Then all at once there rose a spark of fire up from the earth, and presently a soul hovered all trembling near the second world, as if in doubt whether to enter there. And Christ a second time raised up the earth ball, and the bodily frame from whence this soul had winged its way was lying still on earth, marked with the scars and wounds of a long life. Beside this fallen leafage of the soul a grey old man was standing, and, speaking to the corpse, he said, “I am as old as thou; why must my death be after thine, oh kind and faithful wife? Morning by morning, evening by evening, now, what can I do but think how deep thy grave, how far thy form has crumbled on its course to undistinguished dust, till my time comes to lie and crumble with thee side by side! I am alone! And what a loneliness is mine! For nothing hears me now. She cannot hear! Well! well! To-morrow I shall gaze with such a woe upon her faithful hands and her grey hairs that my poor broken life must snap and end. Oh, thou All-merciful! end it to-day; spare me that last great sorrow.”

Why should it be that, even in old age, when man has grown so weary and oppressed, and has descended to the lowest and last of all the steps that lead him downward to his grave, the spectre, Sorrow, sits so heavy upon him, bowing his head (where every bygone year has left its special thorns) to earth with a new despair?

But the Lord Christ sent not the angel of death with the hand of ice; for he himself looked on the bereaved old man, standing so near him now, with such a glance of glowing solar warmth that the ripe fruit broke from the tree. Like sudden flame his soul burst upwards from his riven heart, and hovering above the second world rejoined that other soul it loved so well; there knit together in silent close embrace, like those of old, they trembled downward into Elysium, where no embrace finds end. And Mary stretched, all love, her hands towards them, and all joy and rapture from her dream, she cried, “Ah, happy pair, ye are together now for evermore.”

But now there rose a pillar of red vapour up on high above the hapless earth, and clung there hiding with its dun folds a battle-field’s loud roar. At length the smoke parted asunder, and two bleeding men were seen lying enlocked in each other’s bleeding arms. They were two grand and glorious friends, and they had sacrificed all to each other, ay! and their very selves,—but not the Fatherland. “Lay thy wounds upon mine, beloved friend. The past lies all behind us now, we can be friends again; thou hast sacrificed me to the Fatherland, as I have thee. Give me thy heart again, ere it bleeds quite away. Alas! we can only die together now.” And each gave to his friend his pierced and wounded heart. But these glorious friends beamed with a lustre such that Death shrank back, and the great berg of ice, wherewith he crushes man, melted away at touching their warm hearts. And the earth kept those two, who rose above her level like two lofty mountains, dowering her with streams, with healing virtues, and with lofty views, she giving only clouds to them in return.

Mary in her dream here glanced and bent her head towards her son, for truly he alone can read, support, and succour hearts like these.

Why does she smile now, like some happy mother? Is it because the earth she loves so well, still rising nearer, seems to hover close above the border of the second world, sweet with the flowers of spring, while nightingales lie brooding, with those burning hearts of theirs pressed on the grasses and the meadow blooms,—the stormy skies all brightening into rainbows? Is it because the earth, never to be forgotten of her heart, now shows so happy and so gay bedecked in its spring dress, radiant in all its flowers, the joy hymn bursting from all its singers’ throats? No, not for this alone; that happy smile breaks over her sleeping face because she sees a mother and her child. For this must be a mother who bends down and holds her arms wide open, and calls in sweet enraptured tones, “Come, darling child, come to my heart again.” This is her child, we see and know, standing all innocence, within the ringing temple of the spring, by his good genius who teaches him—and now goes running up to that smiling form—thus early blest, pressed to that heart overflowing with a mother’s love, scarce understanding the blissful words she speaks. “Oh, dearest child, how thou delightest me. Art thou happy too? Thou lovest me! Oh, look at me, my own, and smile for evermore.”

But now the very blissfulness of her dream woke Mary up; and with a tender tremor she fell upon her own son’s heart, saying with tears, “None, save a mother, knows what it is to love.” And as she spoke the earth sank to its place (where its own æther flowed around its orb), and with it that glad mother with her arms about her child.

And all this bliss bursting upon my heart dissolved my dream. And I awoke—but nothing had truly changed or passed away; for the mother of my dream still clasped her child close to her heart here on earth’s face; she reads my dream, and, for its truth, forgives, perchance, the dreamer who tells his tale.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER IX.

A POTATO WAR WITH WOMEN—AND WITH MEN—A WALK IN DECEMBER—TINDER FOR JEALOUSY—A WAR OF SUCCESSION ON THE SUBJECT OF A PIECE OF CHECKED CALICO—RUPTURE WITH STIEFEL—SAD EVENING MUSIC.

I should very much like to make an incidental digression about this point; however, I feel that I don’t dare.

You see there are, now-a-days, so very few readers (at all events, of the younger and more aristocratic sort) who don’t know everything—while, at the same time, they expect their pet authors (and I don’t blame them for it) to know more than themselves—which is impossible. By the help of the English machinery (now brought to such high perfection), of encyclopædias, of encyclopædic-dictionaries, of conversations-lexicons, of excerpts from conversations-lexicons, of Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Universal Dictionaries of all the Sciences,’ a young man, after devoting his days to it for a month or two (he has no occasion to devote his nights) converts himself into a perfect Senatus Academicus of all the Faculties of a University, which he represents in his own single person; besides, in a sense, also himself standing to it in the relation of the student-body at the same time.

I have never, myself, met with a phenomenal youth of the sort above described, unless it were, perhaps, a fellow I once heard playing in the Baireuth band, who represented in his own person a whole Royal Academy of Music—a complete orchestra—inasmuch as he held, carried, and played upon instruments of every kind. This Panharmonist performing, to us partial harmonists only (as we were), blew a French horn, which he held under his right arm, and this right arm bowed a fiddle placed under his left; and that left arm beat, at the proper moments, a drum which was fastened on his back; his cap was hung round with bells, out of which he shook an accompaniment “alla Turca,” by moving his head, and he had a cymbal strapped upon each of his knees, which he banged vigorously together; so that the man was all music, from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot So that, one is tempted to make this simile-man an occasion and ground-work of further similes, and liken him to a prince who represents in his own person all the instruments of his State, and all its members and representatives. Now, in the presence of readers who are all-knowers, just as this man was an all-player, how is a humble individual such as I, who am but a mere Heidelberg master of seven arts, at the outside, and doctor of a small trifle of philosophy, or so, to venture to take upon himself to attempt such a thing as a bit of a digression with any approach to the clever or the felicitous about it? No; the safe course, in the circumstances, for me is to go quietly on with my story.

We find the advocate, Siebenkæs, once more, then, in full blossom of hope; although that blossom is all sterile, and not of the sort which bears fruit. After his royal shot, he had reckoned upon, at any rate, as many happy days as the money would last for—upon fourteen at least; but mourning-black, now the traveller’s uniform, ought to have been the colour of his upon his earthly night-journey—that voyage pittoresque for poets. Though marmots and squirrels know how to plug up that particular hole in their dwellings which chances to be on the side from which the approaching storm is coming, men do not; Firmian thought if the hole in his purse was mended no more was necessary. Alas! a better thing than money now departed from him—Love. His good Lenette receded to a greater distance from his heart, as he did from hers, day by day.

Her having concealed from him the fact that Rosa had given back the wreath, formed in his heart (as foreign matter lodged in any vessel of the body always does) the nucleus of a gradual deposit of stone about it. But that was only a small matter.

For she brushed and scraped of a morning, and every morning, and that whether (as the saying goes) he “liked it or lumped it.”

She would persist, and insist, on communicating all her prorogations of parliament and other decrees to the servant girl, in several duplicates and revised copies, let him protest as much as he chose.

She asked him every thing she had to ask him (no matter what) two or three separate times over; and that whether he shouted beforehand like a quack doctor at a fair, or swore afterwards like one of his customers.

She continued to say, “It has struck four quarters to four o’clock.”

When he had proved, with immense care and trouble, that Augspurg was not in the Island of Cyprus, she would return him the quiet incontrovertible answer, “Well, it’s not in Roumania either, nor in Bulgaria, nor in the Principality of Jauer, nor in Vauduz, nor in the neighbourhood of Hüshen—two very little, insignificant places, both of them.” He could never bring her to give an unqualified assent, when he made the unconditional and positive assertion (in a loud voice), “It’s in Swabia—or the devil’s in it.” She would go no further than to admit that it was situated, in a certain sense, and to some extent, between Franconia, Bavaria, and Switzerland, &c.; it was only to the bookbinder’s wife that she would acknowledge that it was in Swabia.

Burdens, nay, overloads, of this sort, however, can be borne more or less easily and bravely by a soul fortified by the example of great sufferers—such as a Lycurgus, who let himself be deprived of an eye, and an Epictetus, who allowed his master to hack off his leg; and all these little failings of Lenette’s have been touched upon in a previous chapter. But I have to tell of new shortcomings besides; and as regards these, I leave it to unbiassed married men to determine whether they are among the matters which husbands can, and should, put up with.

Firstly: Lenette washed her hands forty times in the course of the day, at the very least; no matter what she touched, she must needs put herself through this process of Holy Re-baptism; like a Jew, she was rendered unclean by the propinquity of everything. She would far more probably have followed the example of Rabbi Akiba, than have been in the least astonished at his proceedings—who, when he was a captive in prison, and in the direst distress for water, instead of quenching his thirst with the very small quantity of it he could get, preferred to use it for his ablutions.

“Of course it is right and proper that she should be scrupulous about cleanliness,” said Siebenkæs, “and more so than I am; but there are limits to all things. Why doesn’t she rub herself with a towel when anybody breathes upon her? Why not purify her lips with soap after a fly has deposited itself (and not only itself) upon them? I’m sure she turns our sitting-room into a regular English man-of-war, scoured and holystoned from stem to stern every morning; and I look on as pleased as any officer on her quarter-deck.”

If a heavy Irish rain-cloud, or a waterspout with its attendant thunders and lightnings, came over his and her days, she always managed to put her husband right under water (like a Dutch fortress), with all his courageous energy, and gave free course to all her tears. But when the sun of happiness cast a feeble ray no broader than a window into the room, Lenette would always have a hundred things, other than this pleasant one, to attend to and to look at. Firmian had particularly made up his mind that he would most thoroughly winnow the husks from the corn of these few days during which he had a few shillings of ready money in his pocket; that he would skim off the cream of them, and completely hide, with a thick veil, the second Janus face, let it be smiling or weeping over the past or the future, as the case might be; but Lenette would insist upon rending this veil, and pointing to the hidden face. “My dear soul!” her husband more than once implored her, “do but wait till we’re as poor as church mice, and leading the life of a dog, again; then I’ll groan and moan with you with the greatest pleasure.” And she only once made him any pertinent answer, namely, “How long will it be before we’re without a farthing in the house?” But to this he was able to return a still more apposite reply: “If that is your way of looking at the matter, you will never be able to enjoy a single quiet, bright, happy day, unless one can give you his solemn oath that there will never come another dark, cloudy, wretched one again; in which case, of course, you can never enjoy one. What king or emperor—ay! and though he had thrones upon the head of him and crowns under his tail—can ever be sure but that any post-delivery, or any sitting of his parliament, may bring him a cloudy time of it; yet he passes his happy day in his Sans Souci, or his Bellevue (or whatever he may call it), and enjoys his life.” (She shook her head). “I can prove it to you in print, and from the Greek.” And, opening the New Testament, he read out the following passage (inserted by himself on the spur of the moment): “If, in a time of good fortune and happiness, thou delayest the joy of thine heart until a moment shall come in which nothing shall lie before thee save hopes in unbroken sequence for whole years to come, then there can be no true happiness on the face of this changing world. For after ten days, or years, some sorrow shall surely come; and thus thou canst delight in no May-day, though it shower blossoms and nightingales upon thee, since, beyond all doubt, the winter will come thereafter, with its nights and its snowflakes. Yet thou enjoyest thine ardent youth, not thinking with dread upon the ice-pit of age, which is ready in the background, with a gradually-increasing coldness to preserve thee for a certain season. Look, then, upon the glad To-day as a long youth; and let the sad Day-after-to-morrow appear unto thee but as a brief old age.”

“The Latin or the Greek always has a more religious sound, I know,” she answered, “and we often hear the thing in the pulpit, too; and whenever I do hear it preached I always go home and feel much comforted and consoled, till the money’s all gone again.”

He had greater difficulty still to get her to jump for joy quite to his liking at the dinner-table at mid-day. If, instead of their every-day fare, some extraordinary fleshpot of Egypt should chance to be smoking on the table—some dish such as the Counts of Wratislaw might have served, and the Counts of Waldstein have carved, without a blush—then Siebenkæs might be sure that his wife would have at least one hundred things more than usual to finish and to put away before she could come to dinner. There sits her husband, eager to begin; he looks round for her, quietly at first, angrily after a while, but keeps command of himself for two or three entire minutes, during which he has time to remember all his troubles as well as think about the roast—then, however, he discharges the first thunder-clap of his storm, and shouts, “Thunder and lightning! here have I been sitting for a whole Eternity, and everything getting as cold as charity. Wife! Wife!!”

In Lenette, as in other women, the cause of this was not ill-temper, neither was it stupidity, nor stubborn indifference to the matter or to her husband; she really could not do otherwise, however, and that’s quite sufficient explanation.

At the same time, my friend Siebenkæs—who will have this story in his hands even before the printer’s devils get hold of it—musn’t take it ill of me that I divulge to the world in general certain small breakfast-failings of his own—which he has communicated to me with his own lips. As he lay in his trellis-bed in the morning, before getting up, with his eyes closed, there would suddenly flash upon him ideas for his book, and forms in which to express them, such as never occurred to him while he was sitting or standing during the day; and, indeed, I have in the course of my reading found that there have been many men of learning—such, for instance, as Descartes, Abbé Galiani, Basedow—I, myself, too, whom of course I don’t count, who belonged to the Coleopterous family of backswimmers (Notonectæ), and got on quickest in the recumbent position, and in whose cases bed has been the brewing-kettle of their most brilliant and original ideas. I, myself, could point to many such which I have written down immediately after getting out of bed in the morning. Any one who sets himself to work to explain this phenomenon should adduce in the first place the matutinal power of the brain, and the fact of its lending itself with a more nimble, as well as vigorous obedience to the impulses of the spirit after its internal and external holiday of rest; next, the freedom and facility both of thinking and of brain mobility, which the manifold impulsions of the day has not yet begun to weary and impair; and, lastly, the vigour which is a peculiar property of all firstborn things—a vigour which our earliest morning thoughts possess in common with the first impressions of youth.

Now, after the above explanations, it will doubtless seem clear that, when the advocate lay in this fashion, sprouting and sending out long shoots in the warm forcing-house of the pillow, and bearing the most precious flowers and fruit, nothing could strike upon his ear in a harsher and more distracting manner than the voice of Lenette calling from the next room, “Come to breakfast, the coffee’s ready.” He generally gave birth to one or two more happy turns of expression after he did hear it, pricking his ears all the while, however, in dread of a second order to march. But as Lenette knew that he always allowed himself a considerable number of minutes of grace after the summons, she always cried, “Get up, the coffee’s cold,” when it was only just coming to the boil. The notonectic satirist, for his part, had observed the law which governed this precession of the equinoxes, and lay quietly among the feathers breeding his ideas happy and undisturbed when it was only once that she had summoned him, merely answering, “This very moment!” and availing himself of the double usance prescribed by law.

This obliged his wife, for her part, to go farther back, and when the coffee was made and standing by the fire, to cry, “Come, dear, it’s getting quite cold.” Now, on this system, of getting earlier on one side and later on the other, matters became more critical every day, with nowhere a prospect of extrication from the difficulty; in fact, what was naturally to be expected was the arrival of a state of things in which Lenette would end by calling him to get up a whole day too soon; although, in the end, this would eventuate in a mere restoration of the original condition of affairs, just as our suppers at the present day threaten to become too-early breakfasts, and our breakfasts unfashionably early dinners. Had Siebenkæs been able to bear the process of grinding the coffee, he might have moored himself to that as to an anchor of hope, and it would then have been a simple matter to calculate the time the coffee would take to get ready; but this he could not, for, in the absence of a coffee-mill, the coffee was bought ready ground (by everybody in the house, for that matter). If Lenette could have been induced to call him just one exact minute before the coffee was boiling and smoking, she would have done instead of the coffee-mill—however, she could not be induced.

What are trifling differences of opinion before marriage assume large dimensions thereafter—as north winds are warm in summer and cold in winter; the zephyr, when it is breathed forth by conjugal lungs, is like Homer’s zephyr, concerning the biting keenness of which the poet sings so much. For this period onward, Firmian set himself to look with much care and minuteness for every crack, feather, flaw, or cloudiness, which might be discoverable in that diamond—Lenette’s heart. Poor fellow! this being the case with thee, soon, soon must the crumbling altar of thy love go toppling down one stone after another, and the sacrificial fire flutter and go out.

He now discovered that she was not nearly as learned a woman as Mdlles. Burmann and Reiske. It is true no book wearied her, but neither did any interest her, and she could read her one book of Sermons as often as scholars can go through Homer and Kant. Her secular or “profane” authors were only two; in fact, one married pair of authors—the immortal authoress of her own cookery receipts, and that, lady’s husband—but the latter she never read. She paid his essays the tribute of her profoundest admiration, but she never glanced into them. Three sensible words with the bookbinder’s wife were of more value in her eyes than all the bookbinder’s and bookmaker’s printed ones put together. To a literary man who is making new arguments, and new ink, all the year long, it is incomprehensible how those persons who have neither a book, nor a pen, nor a drop of ink in the house (except the pale rusty liquid borrowed from the village schoolmaster) can exist at all. Firmian sometimes appointed himself a species of special Professor-extraordinary, and mounted the professional chair with the view of initiating Lenette into one or two of the elementary principles of Astronomy; but either she had no pineal gland (that manor-house of the soul and its ideas), or else the chambers of her brain were saturated, satiated, and crammed to the roof with lace, bonnets, shirts, and saucepans; at all events, it was beyond his power to get a single star into her head bigger than a reel of cotton. With Pneumatology (Psychology), again, his difficulty was exactly of the converse sort. In this branch of science, where the calculus of the infinitesimally small would have come to his aid with an equal amount of serviceableness as that of the infinitely great in astronomy, Lenette expanded and stretched out the dimensions of the angels, souls, and so forth, passing the minutest and most ethereal of spiritual beings through the stretching mill of her imagination, so that angels—of whom the scholiasts would have invited whole companies to a carpet-dance on the tip of a new needle (or have threaded them with it by couples on one and the same point of space)—expanded on her hands to such an extent that each angel would have filled a cradle by itself; and as for the Devil, he swelled out upon her till he got to be pretty much about the size of her husband.

Further, Siebenkæs discovered an iron-mould stain, a pock-mark or wart, on her heart; he could never warm her into a true lyric enthusiasm of Love, in which she should forget heaven and earth, and all things. She could count the strokes of the town clock amid his kisses; though some affecting story or discourse of his might bring the big tears to her eyes, she could still hear the soup-pot boiling over, and run away to it, tears and all. She would join devoutly in the hymns which came resounding from the other lodgers’ rooms of a Sunday, but in the middle of a verse ask the prosaic question, “What shall I warm for supper?” and he never could forget that, once, when she was listening, apparently much interested and quite touched, to one of his chamber-sermons on death and immortality, she looked at him, thoughtfully it is true, but with a glance directed downward, and said, “Don’t put on that left stocking to-morrow morning till I’ve darned it for you.”

The author of this tale declares that he has sometimes been driven nearly out of his mind by feminine entr’actes of this sort, against the occurrence of which there is no warranty for the man who soars up into the æther in company with these beautiful birds of paradise, and there hovers up and down with them, in the fond hope of hatching the eggs of his phantasies upon their backs up among the clouds.[^[52]] All in an instant, down drops the winged mate, as if by magic, with a green gleam, on to a clod of earth. I admit that this is but an excellence the more; it makes them resemble the hens, whose eyes the Great Optician of the Universe has made so perfect that they can see the most distant sparrow-hawk in the sky as well as the nearest grain of malt on the dunghill. It is to be hoped, indeed, that the author of this story, should he ever chance to marry, may meet with a wife to whom he may be able to give readings concerning the more essential principles and dictata of psychology and astronomy without her bringing in the subject of his stockings in the middle of his loftiest and fullest flights of enthusiasm; but yet he will be well content should one possessed of moderate excellencies fall to his lot—one who shall be capable of accompanying him, side by side with him, in his flights, so far as they may extend—whose eyes and heart may be wide enough to take in the blooming earth and the shining heavens in great, grand masses at a time, and not in mere infinitesimal particles; for whom this universe shall be something higher than a nursery and a ball-room; and who, with feelings delicate and tender, and a heart both pious and wide, should be continually making her husband better and holier. The author’s fondest wishes go not beyond this.

Thus, then, while the flowers, if not the leaves, were falling fast from Firmian’s love, Lenette’s was like a rose somewhat overblown, whose beauty a touch will scatter to the earth. Her husband’s endless arguments wearied her heart at length. Moreover, she was one of those women whose loveliest blossoms remain sterile and dead, unless children troop around to enjoy them, as the flowers of the vine do not produce grapes unless frequented by bees. She belonged to this class of women also in this respect, that she was born to be the spiral mainspring of a housekeeping engine—the stage-manageress of a great household theatre. Alas! the market-value of the shares, and the state of the treasury of the said theatre are well-known to everybody—from Hamburg to Ofen.

Moreover, our couple, like phœnixes and giants, were childless: the two columns stood apart and unconnected, no fruit garlands twining about them to bind them one to another. Firmian had, in imagination, thoroughly rehearsed the character of père de famille, and dispatcher of invitations to be godfather, but it never came to a performance.

What was most of all effective in breaking him away from Lenette’s heart, however, was his dissimilarity to Peltzstiefel. The Schulrath had in him as much of the wearisome, the deliberately circumspect, the grave and reserved, the stiff and starched, the pompous and inflated, the heavy and the dull, as——these three lines have; but this delighted the very soul of our born housekeeper. Siebenkæs, again, was like a jerboa from morning till night. She often said to him, “I’m sure people must think you’re not quite right in the head;” to which he would answer, “And am I?” He concealed the beauty of his character behind a comedy mask, and the trodden-down heels of the buskins he always wore made his stature seem shorter than it really was. The brief drama of his own life he turned into a mere burlesque and parodied epic, and it was from higher motives than mere vain folly that he so gave himself over to grotesque performances. In the first place he delighted with a deep delight in the sense of freedom of soul, and entire absence of all conventional trammels; secondly, he found pleasure in the thought that he travestied—not imitated—the follies of his fellow-men. In acting his part he had a double enjoyment—that of comedian as well as that of the spectator. A person who puts humour into action is a satirical improvisatore. Every male reader understands this though no female reader does. I have often wished that I could place in the hands of a woman, looking at the white sun-ray of wisdom broken into a tinted spectrum by the prism of humour, some powerful lens which should burn that spectrum back into its pristine whiteness,—but it is not to be done. The fine, delicate, womanly sense of the fit, the proper, the becoming, seems to be torn and scratched by the touch of anything angular and unpolished; these souls, so firmly welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts—and in their realm of shadows, France.

Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers—a man who didn’t behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say—and people assured her it was a fact—often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,—concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully—as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province—and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in—with linen to be made up, and so on—didn’t they very often see him jump up and, without a “With your leave,” or “By your leave,” to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork’s-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality.

That portion of earth’s surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.

For the Heimlicher came on the stage again, with his plea of demurrer to Siebenkæs’s suit, in which all he demanded was justice and equity—in other words, the money which was in question, unless Siebenkæs could prove himself to be himself, that is to say, the ward, whose patrimony the Heimlicher had hitherto kept in his paternal hands and purse. This juridical Hell-river took Firmian’s breath away and struck ice-cold to his heart, though he had jumped over the three previous petitions for postponement as easily as the crowned lion over the three rivers in the Gotha coat-of-arms. The wounds which we receive from Fate soon heal, but those inflicted by the blunt and rusty torture-implement of an unjust man suppurate and take long to close. This cut, made into nerves already laid bare by so many a rude clutch and sharp tongue, caused our dear friend some severe pain; yet he had seen that the cut was coming long before it came, and had cried to his spirit, “Look out—mind your head!” Alas! there is something new in every pain. He had even taken legal steps in anticipation of it. A few weeks before he had had evidence sent from Leipsic, where he had studied, to prove that he had formerly been known by the name of Leibgeber, and was, consequently, Blaise’s ward. A young notary there, of the name of Giegold, an old college friend and literary brother in arms, had done him the service of seeing all the people who had known of his Leibgeberhood—particularly a rusty, musty old tutor, who had often been present when the guardian’s register-ships came in—and a postman, who had piloted them into port, and his landlord and other well-informed persons, who all took the Jus credulitalis (or oath of conviction), and whose evidence the young lawyer forwarded to Siebenkæs (like a mountain full of precious ore); he had no great difficulty, to speak of, in paying the postage of it, as he was king of the marksmen.

With this stout club of evidence he resisted and withstood his guardian and robber.

When Blaise’s denial was lodged, the timid Lenette gave herself and the suit up for lost; poverty, lean and bare, seemed in her eyes now to enmesh them in a network of parasite ivy, and there was no other prospect for them but to perish and fall to the ground. Her first proceeding was to burst into loud abuse of Von Meyern; for as he had himself told her that his father-in-law’s three applications for delay had been the result of his intercession, which he had made for her sake alone, she looked upon Blaise’s plea of demurrer as being the first thorn-sucker sent forth by Rosa’s revengeful soul in return for the imprisonment and the sacking he had undergone in Firmian’s house (and half ascribed to her), and for what he had lost.

Up to the day of the shooting-match he had supposed that the husband was his enemy, but not the wife; then, however, his pleasant conceit had been embittered and proved to be groundless. But the Venner not being present to hear her reproaches, she was obliged to turn the full stream of her anger on to her husband, to whom she attributed all the blame, because of his having so wickedly and sinfully changed names with Leibgeber. He who has married a wife will be prepared to relieve me of the trouble of mentioning that it made not the slightest difference what Siebenkæs said in reply or adduced concerning Blaise’s wickedness (who, being the greatest Judas Iscariot and corn-Jew the world contained, would have robbed him just the same if his name had been Leibgeber still, and would have found out a thousand legal byepaths by which to proceed to the plundering of his ward). It had no effect. At last the following words were forced out of him: “You are quite as unjust as I should be were I to attribute this document of Blaise’s to your behaviour to the Venner.” Nothing irritates women so much as derogatory comparisons; they apply them indiscriminately, without distinction. Lenette’s ears lengthened to tongues, like those of Rumour; her husband was immediately out-bawled and unlistened to.

He was obliged to send privately to Peltzstiefel to ask where he had been so long, and why he had utterly forgotten their house; Stiefel was not even in his own house, however, but out walking, for it was a beautiful day.

“Lenette,” said Siebenkæs suddenly—he often preferred vaulting over a marsh on the leaping-pole of an idea to wading painfully across it on the long stilts of syllogism, and was anxious to banish from her memory the innocent remark which he had let slip about Rosa, and which she had so utterly misunderstood—“Lenette, I’ll tell you what we’ll do this afternoon; we’ll take a strong cup of coffee, and go and take a walk and enjoy ourselves: it is not a Sunday, but it is the day which all the Catholics in the town keep holiday on as the feast of the Annunciation, and the weather is really too magnificent. We’ll go and sit in the big upstairs room at the Rifle Club-house, as it would be a little too warm outside perhaps, and we can look down from the windows and see all the heterodox people promenading in their best clothes—and our Lutheran Stiefel among them, who knows?”

Either I am more in error than I often am, or this was a most agreeable surprise to Lenette. Coffee, in the morning the water-of-baptism and altar-wine of the fair sex, is their love-philter and their waters-of-strife in the afternoon (the latter, however, only as regards the absent); but what a wondrous mill-stream for the setting in motion of the machinery of the ideas must an afternoon cup of coffee on a common working-day be for a woman such as Lenette, who rarely had any on other than Sunday afternoons; for before the days of the blockade of the continent it cost too much money.

A woman who is really very much delighted needs but a very short time to put on her black silk bonnet and take her big church-fan, and (contrary to all her ordinary manners and customs) be quite ready and dressed for a walk to the Rifle Club-house, even going the length of making the coffee during the process of dressing, so as to be able to take it, and the milk, with her in her hand.

Our couple set forth at two o’clock in the happiest possible frame of mind, carrying with them warm in their pockets what was to be warmed up later on in the afternoon.

Even at two o’clock, early as it was, the western and southern hills lay all beflooded with the warm evening glow with which the low December sun was bathing them, while great glaciers of cloud, ranged about the sky, cast their cheerful lights over the landscape. All about this world there beamed a beautiful brightness, which cheered and lighted up many a dark and narrow life.

Siebenkæs pointed out the eagle’s perch to Lenette while they were still at some distance from it—the alpenstock or boat-pole which had so recently helped him out of his most imminent difficulties. When they reached the Clubhouse he took her and showed her the shooter’s-stand where he had shot himself with his rifle up to the dignity of bird emperor, and out of the Frankfort-Jew’s-quarter of duns, liberating at his coronation at least one debtor, namely, himself. They had room and to spare to “spread themselves out” (so to speak) upstairs in the members’ hall—he at a writing-table by the right-hand window, and she with her work at another on the left.

How the coffee gave warmth to this December festival may be imagined, but not described.

Lenette put on one stocking of her husband’s after another—put them on her left arm, that is, while her right wielded the darning-needle; and as she sat, with a stocking generally quite open at the bottom, she was, as regarded one of her arms at all events, like a lady with the long, fashionable Danish mittens, with holes for the fingers. However, she did not raise these arm-stockings of hers high enough to be seen by the people walking in the upper walks, but kept nodding down her “your very humble and obedient servant” from the open window to numbers of the most genteel she-heretics as they passed, wearing her own works of art upon their heads, in honour of the Annunciation-feast; and more than one sent an obliging salute up to her roof-thatcher.

The strictest religious and political parity being established by law in Kuhschnappel, it was natural that Protestants of position should also go a-walking on this Catholic holiday. However, the advocate was perhaps enjoying himself quite as much as his wife; he went on writing his ‘Devil’s Papers,’ and at the same time feasting his gaze upon the high places, the sommités of the landscape, if not of Kuhschnappel society.

When he first entered the room he had a most agreeable reception from a child’s trumpet, left there by accident; the paint was not quite all licked away from it, and it was the smell of this paint, more even than the squeak of the trumpet, which pleased him so very much, by recalling the vague delights of Christmases of the past: so that pleasure was heaped upon pleasure. He could rise from his satires and point out to Lenette the great rooks’ nests in the leafless trees, and the bare tables and benches in the arbours, and the invisible guests who had occupied seats of the blessed there on summer evenings, and still remembered the time, looking forward to a repetition of it; and he could draw her attention to the fields, where, late as it was in the year, volunteer gardeneresses were gathering salad for him, namely, corn salad or rampion, which he might have some of for supper if he had a mind.

And now he sat at his window, with his eyes fixed upon the hills, all flushed with the evening red, the sun growing larger as it sunk towards them. Beyond these hills lay the lands where wandered his Leibgeber, sporting away his life.

“How delightful it is, wife,” he said, “that what parts me from Leibgeber is not a mere wide level plain, with nothing but a hillock or two cropping up here and there on it, but a grand, lofty wall of mountains, behind which he stands as if behind the grating of a monastery.” This sounded to her almost as if her husband was glad that this barrier stood between them; she herself had but little liking for Leibgeber, and considered him to be a sort of coin-clipper to her husband, who cut all his angles sharper than they were by nature; however, in dubious cases like this, she was always glad to ask no questions. What he had meant was exactly the reverse of what she supposed; he had meant that it is good, if parted from those we love, that it should be by holy hills, because they are, as it were, lofty garden-walls, behind which we picture the flowery thickets of our Edens; whereas, on the other verge of the broadest barnfloor of a level plain we only picture to ourselves a repetition of it sloping the other way. And this applies to nations as well as to individuals. The Luneburg moors or the Marklands of Prussia will not draw even an Italian’s longing gaze towards Italy; but when a Markman in Italy sees the Apennines, his heart yearns to his German loved ones behind them.

As Firmian looked upon that sunny mountain-barrier between two severed spirits, there was that in his eyes which much resembled tears; but he only turned his chair a little away, that Lenette might ask no questions; he was well aware of his old ingrained habit of getting angry when anybody asked what brought tears to his eyes, and he strove with it. Was he not, in fact, tenderness personified to-day, only acting his comedy in the palest middle-tints before his wife, because he was delighting in the fresh-growth of this enjoyment of hers, of which he was himself the origin. It is true she did not discover the existence of this, his feeling of delicate consideration for her; but just as he was quite content when no one but himself (least of all, she) perceived that he was poking fun at her (in the most delicate manner), so was he content that she should be in utter ignorance that he was causing her a little happiness.

At last they left the spacious room, the sun now robing them in purple hues; and as they went he drew Lenette’s attention to the liquid, golden splendour shining upon the roofs of the greenhouses, and he hung himself on to the sun—at that moment cut in two by the mountain-range—that he might sink, with it, to his far-away friend. Ah! how strong is love in distance—be it distance of space, or of time, of the future or the past—ay, or that greater distance still—beyond this world! And so the evening might very well have ended in an altogether delightful manner, had not something intervened.

For some particularly ingenious evil spirit or other had taken the Heimlicher von Blaise, and so set him down, promenading in the open air, that the advocate must needs come within shooting range and hailing distance of him just on a feast of the Annunciation for good folks only. When the guardian went through the proper forms of salutation—accompanying them with a smile such as, fortunately, can never be seen on a child’s face—Siebenkæs returned his salutes politely, although with a mere clutching and jerking at his hat—which he didn’t take off. Lenette tried to make amends for this, by doubling the profundity of her own bow and curtsey; but as soon as practicable she administered to her husband a garden lecture, or, rather, a garden paling lecture, on his always, as if on purpose, irritating his guardian whenever he had an opportunity. “Indeed, love,” he said, “I couldn’t help it. I really meant nothing of the kind to-day, of all days in the year.”

The truth of the matter, indeed, is, that Siebenkæs had sometime before complained to his wife that his hat, which was of softish felt, was getting a good deal spoiled by having to be so often taken off to people in the streets, and that he could think of nothing better than to protect it with a coat of mail in the shape of a stiff cover of green oilskin, so that when packed up in this pudding roll he might go on daily employing it in those offices of out-door politeness which men owe one to another, without ever having to take hold of the hat itself at all. Well, the first walk he took after assuming this double hat, or hat’s hat, was to a grocer’s, where he disembowelled the inner one from its envelope and swopped it away for six pounds of coffee, which warmed the four chambers of his brain better than the hare-skin had ever done; he then went tranquilly home, with only the coadjutor hat on his head, undetected, and thenceforward bore the empty case through the streets with a secret joy that, in a sense, he now really took off his hat to nobody—with other entertaining fancies bearing on the subject of his sugar-loaf.

Of course, when he forgot—and on that day in particular, it was perhaps excusable that he did so—to support his hat-case with the necessary framework of artificial rafters, it was really almost an impossibility to take this mere shell of a hat right OFF for purposes of salutation. The most he could do was just to touch it courteously, like an officer returning a salute; and thus, against his will, play the part of a rude and ill-bred individual.

And it so happened that just on this very day get it off he could not.

It was so ordained, however, that matters should not even rest here (as regarded our couple’s promenade), but one of the above-mentioned ingenious evil spirits changed the scene of the drama with such nimbleness, that we have a fresh combination before our eyes before we know where we are. Just in front of our wedded pair, a master tailor of the Catholic confession was taking his walk, most sprucely attired in honour of the Feast of the Annunciation, like all the rest of his pro- and CON-fession. As ill luck would have it, this tailor, being in a narrow walk, had (whether for fear of mud, or in the delight of his soul over his holiday) so elevated his coat-tails that the vertebral extremity, the os coccygis, or (shall we call it) insertion of the spinal cord, of his waistcoat, was clearly exhibited; in other words, the background of his waistcoat, which, as we know, is generally executed in colours more subdued than those used for the brighter and more prominent foreground on the chest of the wearer. “Hy! Mr.!” cried Lenette; “what are you doing with a lot of my chintz on the back of you?”

The truth was that this tailor had put aside and taken possession of so much of a nice green Augspurg chintz (sent to him by Lenette, on her becoming a queen, to make her a new body) as he considered proper and Christianly honest, calculating on the principle of “no charge for wine samples,” and this trifle of a sample had just barely sufficed to form a sober background to his pea-green waistcoat; and he had contented himself with so dim a reverse side for this waistcoat in the confident expectation that it would never be seen. However, as the tailor went on with his walk (after Lenette had shouted her query at him), as utterly unmoved as if it had nothing on earth to do with him, the little spark of her anger became a blazing flame, and, regardless of all her husband’s winks and whispers, she cried aloud, “Why, it’s my very own chintz, that I got all the way from Augspurg; do you hear, Mr. Mowser, you’ve stolen my chintz, you blackguard, you!” Then, and not till then, the guilty chintz-robber turned round with much sangfroid, and said, “Prove that, if you please! But, mind, I’ll CHINTZ YOU, if there be such a thing as law in all Kuhschnappel.”

At this she burst into a conflagration. Her husband’s prayers and entreaties were but as wind to her. “Ey! you riff-raff,” she snapped out. “But I’ll have what’s my own—you villain!” she cried. The only reply the tailor vouchsafed to this attack was this—he simply lifted his coat-tails with both hands high above the endorsed waistcoat, and, bending a little forward, said, “There!” after which he strode slowly on, keeping at the same focal distance from her, so as to bask in her warmth as long as possible.

Siebenkæs was the most to be pitied on this rich feast day, when, in spite of all his juristic and theological exorcisms, he could not cast out this devil of discord—when by good luck his guardian angel suddenly emerged from a side path, Peltzstiefel to wit, taking his walk. Gone, so far as Lenette was concerned, were the tailor, the quarter-ell of chintz, the apple of discord, and the devil thereof; the blue of her eyes and the blush on her cheek fronted Stiefel as bright and as fresh as the blue of the evening sky and the blush on its sunset clouds. Ten ells of chintz and half that number of tailors with waistcoat-backs of it into the bargain, were to her, at that moment, feathers light as air, not worth a word or a farthing; so that Siebenkæs saw on the instant that Stiefel’s coming was as that of a regular Mount of Olives all full of mere olive-branches of peace; although for discord devils hailing from another quarter there might without difficulty be pressed from the olives on said mountain an oil which could not be poured on any fire of matrimonial difference which Stiefel’s would be the bucket to put out. If Lenette was a tender, delicate, white butterfly, silently hovering and fluttering about Peltzstiefel’s flowery path, out of doors—when she got him into her house she was an absolute Greek Psyche; and, in spite of all my partiality for her, I am bound, under pain of having all the rest discredited, to insert in this protocol a clear statement (much as I regret to do so) to the effect that on this particular evening she gave one the idea of being nothing but some clear-winged translucent soul free from all trammels of body—which, at some former time, while as yet in the body, had stood in some love-relationship to the Schulrath, but now hovered about him with upraised pinions, and fanned him with fluttering downy plumes, and which at length weary of hovering, and pleased to rest once more on the loved perch of a body, settled upon Lenette’s, there being no other feminine one at hand, and there folded its wings to rest. Such seemed Lenette. But why was she thus to-day? Stiefel’s ignorance and delight at it were great; Firmian’s very small. Before I explain it, I will say, “I pity thee, poor husband, and thee, too, poor wife. For why must the smooth flow of the stream of your life (and of our own) be always broken by sorrows or by sins, and why cannot it fall into its grave in the Black Sea, without having to pass over thirteen cataracts, like the river Dnieper?” However, the reason why Lenette on this day in particular exhibited all her heart toward Stiefel, almost bared of the cloister grating of the breast, was that she was, just on this day, so keenly suffering under her misery—her poverty. Stiefel was full of genuine, solid treasures; Firmian’s were all lacquered. I know that her Siebenkæs, whom before marriage she had loved with the calm and cool regard of a wife, would have found that she would have come to love him after marriage with the warm affection of a fiancée, if he had only been able to give her the bare necessaries of life. There are hundreds of girls who bring themselves to believe that they love the man to whom they are engaged, whereas it is not till after marriage that the play becomes a reality—and that for good reasons, both metallic and physiological. In a well-filled room and kitchen, filled with a comfortable income, and twelve household labours of Hercules, Lenette would have been quite true to the advocate, though an entire philosophical society of Stiefels had sat down all round her, and would have said and thought, every hour of the day, “No more, thank you—I am helped;” but as things were, in a house and kitchen so empty as hers, the chambers of a woman’s heart grow full; in one word, no good comes of it. For a woman’s soul is by nature a beautiful fresco painted on rooms, table-leaves, dresses, silver salvers, and household plenishing in general. A woman has a large stock of virtue, but few virtues; she needs a confined sphere and social forms, and without these flower-sticks the pure white flowers trail in the dust of the border. A man may be a citizen of the world, and if he has nothing else to put his arms round he can press the entire earthly ball to his bosom, although he can’t put his arms round much more of it than will make him a grave. But a citizeness of the world is a giantess, and goes through the world with nothing but spectators, and is nothing but a character on the stage.

I ought to have described the whole of this evening much more circumstantially than I have done, for it was upon this evening that the wheels of the vis-à-vis phæton of wedded life began to smoke, as a consequence of the friction they had recently been subjected to, and threatened to break out into a blaze of the fire of jealousy. Jealousy is like Maria Theresa’s small-pox, which allowed that princess to pass with impunity through thirty hospitals, full of small-pox patients, but attacked her beneath the Crowns of Hungary and Germany. Siebenkæs had had on that of Kuhschnappel (the Bird-one) for a week or two now.

After this evening Stiefel, who took an increasing delight in sitting basking in the rays of the still rising Sun of Lenette, came oftener and oftener, and considered himself the peace-maker, not the peace-breaker.

It is now my duty to paint with the utmost minutiæ of detail the last and most important day of this year, the 31st of December, with its background and foreground all complete, and with all accessories.

Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs’s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically—a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkæs’s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[^[53]]

However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don’t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar’s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, “This sweet emotion of my heart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs.” We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. “Yes, I have to thank them for this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in their own heads—kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!” Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, “Great as is the pain which his satires cause me, they cause him far more; luckily, my pain is only mental!” Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner’s feet, a wrestler’s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and that their extraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.

With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress—one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.

He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers—only in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. “Little authors,” he said, “are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings—e.g. self-conceit—in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when they are merited—though I am aware Cicero is against me here—for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse.” If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony against the race, but the individual will be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.

For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang’s essay, entitled “Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium—Continuatione XX.” It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, so hatching. The new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and more in advance of actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on her index expurgandorum, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart’s full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.

For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)—because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette’s funereal Misereres.

“Wife!” he said, “I’m reviewing for money now, recollect.” She went on with her scraping. “I have got Professor Lang before me here—the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth.” She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she really could NOT. Women are fond of doing everything “by and bye”—they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[^[54]] “This essay,” he continued, with forced calmness, “ought to have been reviewed in the ‘Messenger’ six months ago, and it’ll never do for the ‘Messenger’ to be like the ‘Universal German Library’ and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date.”

If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette’s buzzing din; however, he couldn’t. “Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the ‘Messenger of the Gods’ into the bargain,” he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. “I don’t know,” he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over him—“I don’t know a bit what I’m translating, or whether I’m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn’t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours.” He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.

He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, “I can’t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you rather overdid your cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!” To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well it was irony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.

In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out—the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour’s and Muhammed’s red battle-flag, this Ziska’s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: “This,” he said, “is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Cassim’s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour—send it to the pawn-shop!”

“Don’t answer just yet,” he said, gently laying his hand on her lips; “let me just remind you what a stupid parish did when the only blacksmith there was in it was going to be hanged in the village. This parish thought it preferable to condemn an innocent master-tailor or two to the gallows, because they could be better spared. Now, a woman of your good sense must surely see how much easier and better it would be to let me take away this mere piece of tailor’s stitch-work, than metal things which we eat out of every day; the mourning calico won’t be wanted, you know, as long as I’m alive.”

“I’ve seen quite clearly for a long while past,” she said, “that you’ve made up your mind to carry off my mourning dress from me, by hook or by crook, whether I will or no. But I’m not going to let you have it. Suppose I were to say to you, pawn your watch, how would you like that?” Perhaps the reason why husbands get into the way of issuing their orders in a needlessly dictatorial manner is, that they generally have little effect, but rather confirm opposition than overcome it.

“Damnation!” he cried; “that’ll do, that’s quite enough! I’m not a turkey-cock, nor a bonassus neither, to be continually driven into a frenzy by a piece of coloured rag. It goes to the pawn-shop to-day, as sure as my name’s Siebenkæs.”

“Your name is Leibgeber as well,” said she.

“Devil fly away with me, if that calico remains in this house!” said he. On which she began to cry, and lament the bitter fortune which left her nothing now, not even the very clothes for her back. When thoughtless tears fall into a seething masculine heart, they often have the effect which drops of water have when they fall upon bubbling molten copper; the fluid mass bursts asunder with a great explosion.

“Heavenly, kind, gentle Devil,” said he, “do please come and break my neck for me. May God have pity on a woman like this! Very well, then, keep your calico; keep this Lenten altar-cloth of yours to yourself. But may the Devil fly away with me if I don’t cock the old deer’s horns that belonged to my father on to my head this very day, like a poacher on the pillory, and hawk them about the streets for sale in broad daylight. Ay. I give you my word of honour it shall be done, for all the fun it may afford every soul in the place. And I shall simply say that it is your doing; I’ll do it, as sure as there’s a devil in hell.”

He went, gnashing his teeth, to the window, and looked into the street, seeing vacancy. A rustic funeral was passing slowly by; the bier was a man’s shoulder, and on it tottered a child’s rude coffin.

Such a sight is a touching one, when one thinks of the little, obscure, human creature, passing over from the fœtal slumber to the slumber of death, from the amnion-membrane in this life to the shroud, that amnion-membrane of the next; whose eyes have closed at their first glimpse of this bright earth, without looking on the parents who now gaze after it with theirs so wet with tears; which has been loved without loving in return; whose little tongue moulders to dust before it has ever spoken; as does its face ere it has smiled upon this odd, contradictory, inconsistent orb of ours. These cut buds of this mould will find a stem on which great destiny will graft them, these flowers which, like some besides, close in sleep while it is still early morning, will yet feel the rays of a morning sun which will open them once more. As Firmian looked at the cold, shrouded child passing by, in this hour, when he was ignobly quarrelling about the mourning dress (which should mourn for him)—now, when the very last drops of the old year were flowing so fast away, and his heart, now becoming so terribly accustomed to these passing fainting fits, forbade him to hope that he could ever complete the new one—now, amid all these pains and sorrows, he seemed to hear the unseen river of Death murmuring under his feet (as the Chinese lead rushing brooks under the soil of their gardens), and the thin, brittle crust of ice on which he was standing seemed as if it would soon crack and sink with him into the watery depths. Unspeakably touched, he said to Lenette, “Perhaps you may be quite right, dear, after all, to keep your mourning dress; you may have some presentiment that I am not going to live. Do as you think best, then, dear; I would fain not embitter this last of December any more; I don’t know that it may not be my last in another sense, and that in another year I may not be nearer to that poor baby than you. I am going for a walk now.”

She said nothing; all this startled and surprised her. He hurried away, to escape the answer which was sure to come eventually; his absence would, in the circumstances, be the most eloquent kind of oratory. All persons are better than their outbreaks (or ebullitions)—that is, than their bad ones; for all are worse than their noble ones, also—and when we allow the former an hour or so to dissipate and disperse, we gain something better than our point—we gain our opponent. He left Lenette a very grave subject for cogitation, however,—the stag’s horns and his word of honour.

I have already once written it. The winter was lying on the ground all bare and naked, not even the bed-sheet and chrisom-cloth of snow thrown over it; there it lay beside the dry, withered mummy of the by-gone summer. Firmian looked with an unsatisfied gaze athwart unclothed fields (over which the cradle-quilt of the snow, and the white crape of the frost, had not yet been laid), and down at the streams, not yet struck palsied and speechless. Bright, warm days at the end of December soften us with a sadness in which there are four or five bitter drops more than in that belonging to the after-summer. Up to twelve o’clock at night, and until the thirty-first day of the twelfth month, the wintry, nocturnal, idea of dissolution and decay oppresses us; but as soon as it is one in the morning, and the first of January, a morning breeze, speaking of new life, moves away the clouds which were lying over our souls, and we begin to look for the dark, pure, morning blue, the rising of the star of morning and of spring. On a December day like this the pale, dim, stagnant world of stiffened, sapless, plants about us oppresses and hems us round; and the insect-collections lying beneath the vegetation, covered with earth; and the rafter-work of bare, dry, wrinkly trees; the December sun hanging in the sky at noon no higher than the June sun does at evening; all these combined shed a yellow lustre as of death (like that of burning alcohol) over the pale, faded meadows; and long giant shadows lie extended, motionless, everywhere—evening shadows of this evening of nature and of the year—like the ruined remains, the burnt-out ash-heaps of nights as long as themselves. But the glistening snow, on the other hand, spread over the blooming earth under us, is like the blue foreground of spring, or a white fog a foot or two in depth. The quiet dark sky lies above, and the white earth is like some white moon, whose sparkling ice-fields melt, as we draw nearer, into dark waving meadows of flowers.

The heart of our sorrowful Firmian grew sadder yet as he stood upon this cold, burnt-out hearth-place of nature. The daily-recurring pausings of his heart and pulse were (he thought) the sudden silences of the storm-bell in his breast, presaging a speedy end of the thunder, and dissolution of the storm-cloud, of life. He thought the faltering of his mechanism was caused by some loose pin having fallen in among the wheels somewhere; he ascribed it to polypus of the heart, and his giddiness he felt sure gave warning of an attack of apoplexy. To-day was the three hundred and sixty-fifth Act of the year, and the curtain was slowly dropping upon it already: what could this suggest to him save gloomy similes of his own epilogue—of the winter solstice of his shortened, over-shadowed life? The weeping image of his Lenette came now before his forgiving, departing soul, and he thought, “She is really not in the right; but I will yield to her, as we have not very long to be together now. I am glad for her sake, poor soul, that my arms are mouldering away from about her, and that her friend is taking her to his.”

He went up on to the scaffold of blood and sorrow where his friend, Heinrich, had taken his farewell. From that eminence, as often as his heart was heavy, his glance would follow Leibgeber’s path as far as the hills; but to-day his eyes were moister than before, for he had no hope that he would see the spring again. This spot was to him the hill which the Emperor Adrian permitted the Jews to go up twice in the year, that they might look towards the ruins of the holy city and weep for the place wherein their steps might tread no more. The sun was now assembling the shadows which were to close in upon the old year, and as the stars appeared—the stars which rose at evening now being those which in spring adorn the morning—fate snapped away the loveliest and richest in flowers of the liana-branches from his soul, and from the wound flowed clear water. “I shall see nothing of the coming spring,” he thought, “except her blue, which, as in enamel-painting, is the first laid on of all her colours.” His heart—one educated to be loving—could always fly for rest from his satires and from dry details of business-duty, sometimes, too, from Lenette’s indifference and lack of sympathy, to the warm breast of the eternal goddess Nature, ever ready to take us to her heart. Into the free, unveiled, and blooming out-door world, beneath the grand wide sky, he loved to repair with all his sighs and sorrows, and in this great garden he made all his graves (as the Jews made them in smaller ones). And when our fellows forsake and wound us, the sky and the earth, and the little blooming tree, open their arms and take us into them; the flowers press themselves to our wounded hearts, the streams mingle in our tears, and the breezes breathe coolness into our sighs. A mighty angel troubles and inspires the great ocean-pool of Bethesda; into its warm waves we plunge, with all our thousand aches and pains, and ascend from the water of life with our spasms all relaxed and our health and vigour renewed once more.

Firmian walked slowly home with a heart all conciliation, and eyes which, now that it was dark, he did not take the pains to dry. He went over in his mind everything which could possibly be adduced in his Lenette’s excuse. He strove to win himself over to her side of the question by reflecting that she could not (like him) arm herself against the shocks, the stumbling-stones, of life by putting on the Minerva’s helm, the armour of meditation, philosophy, authorship. He thoroughly determined (he had determined the same thing thirty times before) to be as scrupulously careful to observe in all things the outside politesses of life with her as with the most absolute stranger;[^[55]] nay, he already enveloped himself in the fly-net or mail-shirt of patience, in case he should really find the checked calico untranslated at home. This is how we men continually behave—stopping our ears tight with both hands, trying our hardest to fall into the siesta, the mid-day sleep, of a little peace of mind (if we can only anyhow manage it); thus do our souls, swayed by our passions, reflect the sunlight of truth as one dazzling spot (like mirrors or calm water), while all the surrounding surface lies but in deeper shade.

How differently all fell out! He was received by Peltzstiefel, who advanced to meet him, all solemnity of deportment, and with a church-visitation countenance full of inspection-sermons. Lenette scarcely turned her swollen eyes towards the windward side of her husband as he came in at the door. Stiefel kept the strings tight which held the muscles of his knit face, lest it might unbend before Firmian’s, which was all beaming soft with kindliness, and thus commenced: “Mr. Siebenkæs, I came to this house to hand you the money for your review of Professor Lang; but friendship demands of me a duty of a far more serious and important kind, that I should exhort you and constrain you to conduct yourself towards this poor unfortunate wife of yours here like a true Christian man to a true Christian woman.” “Or even better, if you like,” he said. “What is it all about, wife?” She preserved an embarrassed silence. She had asked Stiefel’s advice and assistance, less for the sake of obtaining them than to have an opportunity of telling her story. The truth was, that when the Schulrath came unexpectedly in, while her burst of crying was at its bitterest, she had really just that very moment sent her checked, spiny, outer caterpillar-skin (the calico-dress, to wit) away to the pawnshop; for her husband having pledged his honour, she felt sure that, beyond a doubt, he would stick those preposterous horns on his head and really go and hawk them, all over the town, for she well knew how sacredly he kept his word, and also how utterly he disregarded “appearances,”—and that both of these peculiarities of his were always at their fellest pitch at a time of domestic difficulty like the present. Perhaps she would have told her ghostly counsellor and adviser nothing about the matter, but contented herself with having a good cry when he came, if she had had her way (and her dress); but, having sacrificed both, she needed compensation and revenge. At first she had merely reckoned up difficulties in indeterminate quantities to him; but when he pressed her more closely, her bursting heart overflowed and all her woes streamed forth. Stiefel, contrarily to the laws of equity (and of several universities), always held the complainant in any case to be in the right, simply because he spoke first: most men think impartiality of heart is impartiality of head. Stiefel swore that he would tell her husband what he ought to be told, and that the calico should be back in the house that very afternoon.

So this father-confessor began to jingle his bunch of binding-and-loosing keys in the advocate’s face, and reported to him his wife’s general confession and the pawning of the dress. When there are two diverse actions of a person to be given account of—a vexatious and an agreeable one—the effect depends on which is spoken of the first; it is the first narrated one which gives the ground-tint to the listener’s mind, and the one subsequently portrayed only takes rank as a subdued accessory figure. Firmian should have heard that Lenette pawned the dress first, while he was still out of doors, and of her tale-bearing not till afterwards. But you see how the devil brought it about, as it really did all happen. “What!” (Siebenkæs felt, if not exactly thought) “What! She makes my rival her confidant and my judge! I bring her home a heart all kindness and reconciliation, and she makes a fresh cut in it at once, distressing and annoying me in this way, on the very last day of the year, with her confounded chattering and tale-telling.” By this last expression he meant something which the reader does not yet quite understand; for I have not yet told him that Lenette had the bad habit of being—rather ill-bred; wherefore she made common people of her own sex, such as the bookbinder’s wife, the recipients of her secret thoughts—the electric discharging-rods of her little atmospheric disturbances; while, at the same time, she took it ill of her husband that, though he did not, indeed, admit serving-men and maids and “the vulgar” into his own mysteries, he yet accompanied them into theirs.

Stiefel (like all people who have little knowledge of the world, and are not gifted with much tact,—who never assume anything as granted in the first place, but always go through every subject ab initio)—now delivered a long, theological, matrimonial-service sort of exhortation concerning love as between Christian husband and wife, and ended by insisting on the recall of the calico (his Necker, so to say). This address irritated Firmian, and that chiefly because (irrespectively of it) his wife thought he had not any religion, or, at all events, not so much as Stiefel. “I remember” (he said) “seeing in the history of France that Gaston, the first prince of the blood, having caused his brother some little difficulties or other of the warlike sort on one occasion, in the subsequent treaty of peace bound himself, in a special article, to love Cardinal Richelieu. Now I think there’s no question but that an article to the effect that man and wife shall love one another ought to be inserted as a distinct, separate, secret clause, in all contracts of marriage; for though love, like man himself, is by origin eternal and immortal, yet, thanks to the wiles of the serpent, it certainly becomes mortal enough within a short time. But, as far as the calico’s concerned, let’s all thank God that that apple of discord has been pitched out of the house.” Stiefel, by way of offering up a sacrifice, and burning a little incense before the shrine of his beloved Lenette, insisted on the return of the calico, and did so very firmly; for Siebenkæs’s gentle, complaisant readiness to yield to him, up to this point, in little matters of sacrifice and service, had led him to entertain the deluded idea that he possessed an irresistible authority over him. The husband, a good deal agitated now, said, “We’ll drop the subject, if you please.” “Indeed, we’ll do nothing of the kind,” said Stiefel; “I must really insist upon it that your wife has her dress back.” “It can’t be done, Herr Schulrath.” “I’ll advance you whatever money you require,” cried Stiefel, in a fever of indignation at this striking and unwonted piece of disobedience. It was now, of course, more impossible than ever for the advocate to retire from his position; he shook his head eighty times. “Either you are out of your mind,” said Stiefel, “or I am; just let me go through my reasons to you once more.” “Advocates,” said Siebenkæs, “were fortunate enough, in former times, to have private chaplains of their own; but it was found that there was no converting any of them, and therefore they are now exempt from being preached at.”

Lenette wept more bitterly—Stiefel shouted the louder on that account; in his annoyance at his ill success, he thought it well to repeat his commands in a ruder and blunter form; of course Siebenkæs resisted more firmly. Stiefel was a pedant, a class of men which surpasses all others in a bare-faced, blind, self-conceit, just like an unceasing wind blowing from all the points of the compass at once (for a pedant even makes an ostentatious display of his own personal idiosyncrasies). Stiefel, like a careful and conscientious player, felt it a duty to thoroughly throw himself into the part he was representing, and carry it out in all its details, and say, “Either” “Or” Mr. Siebenkæs; “either the mourning gown comes, or I go, aut-aut. My visits cannot be of much consequence, it’s true, still they have I consider, a certain value, if it were but on Mrs. Siebenkæs’s account.” Firmian, doubly irritated, firstly at the imperious rudeness and conceit of an alternative of the sort, and secondly at the lowness of the market price for which the Rath abandoned their society, could but say, “Nobody can influence your decision on that point now but yourself. I most certainly cannot. It will be an easy matter for you, Herr Schulrath, to give up our acquaintance—though there is no real reason why you should—but it will not be easy for me to give up yours, although I shall have no choice.” Stiefel, from whose brow the sprouting laurels were thus so unexpectedly shorn—and that, too, in the presence of the woman he loved—had nothing to do but take his leave; but he did it with three thoughts gnawing at his heart—his vanity was hurt, his dear Lenette was crying, and her husband was rebellious and insubordinate, and resisting his authority.

And as the Schulrath said farewell for ever, a bitter, bitter sorrow stood fixed in the eyes of his beloved Lenette—a sorrow which, though the hand of time has long since covered it over, I still see there in its fixity; and she could not go down stairs, as at other times, with her sorrowing friend, but went back into the dark, unlighted room, alone with her overflowing breaking heart.

Firmian’s heart laid aside its hardness, though not its coldness, at the sight of his persecuted wife in her dry, stony grief at this falling to ruin of every one of her little plans and joys; and he did not add to her sorrow by a single word of reproach. “You see,” was all he said, “that it is no fault of mine that the Schulrath gives up our acquaintance; he ought never to have been told anything about the matter,—however, it’s all over now.” She made no reply. The hornet’s sting (which makes a triple stab), the dagger, thrown as by some revengeful Italian, was left sticking firm in her wound, which therefore could not bleed. Ah! poor soul; thou hast deprived thyself of so much! Firmian, however, could not see that he had anything to accuse himself of; he being the gentlest, the most yielding of men under the sun, always ruffled all the feathers on his body up with a rustle in an instant at the slightest touch of compulsion, most especially if it concerned his honour. He would accept a present, it is true, but only from Leibgeber, or (on rare occasions) from others in the warmest hours of soul communion; and his friend and he both held the opinion that, in friendship, not only was a farthing of quite as much value as a sovereign, but that a sovereign was worth just as little as a farthing, and that one is bound to accept the most splendid presents just as readily as the most trifling; and hence he counted it among the unrecognised blessings of childhood that children can receive gifts without any feeling of shame.

In a mental torpor he now sat down in the arm-chair, and covered his eyes with his hand; and then the mists which hid the future all rolled away, and showed in it a wide dreary tract of country, full of the black ashy ruins of burnt homesteads, and of dead bushes of underwood, and the skeletons of beasts lying in the sand. He saw that the chasm, or landslip, which had torn his heart and Lenette’s asunder, would go on gaping wider and wider; he saw, oh! so clearly and cheerlessly, that his old beautiful love would never come back, that Lenette would never lay aside her self-willed pertinacity, her whims, the habits of her daily life; that the narrow limits of her heart and head would remain fixed firmly for ever; that she would as little learn to understand him, as get to love him; while, again, her repugnance to him would get the greater the longer her friend’s banishment endured, and that her fondness for the latter would increase in proportion. Stiefel’s money, and his seriousness, and religion, and attachment to herself combined to tear in two the galling bond of wedlock by the pressure of a more complex and gentle tie. Sorrowfully did Siebenkæs gaze into a long prospect of dreary days, all constrained silence, and dumb hostility and complaint.

Lenette was working in her room in silence, for her wounded heart shrunk from a word or a look as from a cold fierce wind. It was now very dark, she wanted no light. On a sudden, a wandering street-singing woman began to play a harp, and her child to accompany her on a flute, somewhere in the house downstairs. At this our friend’s bursting heart seemed to have a thousand gashes inflicted on it to let it bleed gently away. As nightingales love to sing where there is an echo, so our hearts speak loudest to music. As these tones brought back to him his old hopes, almost irrecognisable now,—as he gazed down at his Arcadia now lying hidden deep, deep, beneath the stream of years, and saw himself down in it, with all his young fresh wishes, amid his long lost friends, gazing with happy eyes round their circle, all confidence and trust, his growing heart hoarding and cherishing its love and truth for some warm heart yet to be met in the time to come: and as he now burst into that music with a dissonance, crying, “And I have never found that heart, and now all is past and over,” and as the pitiless tones brought pictures of blossomy springs and flowery lands, and circles of loving friends to pass, as in a camera obscura, before him—him who had nothing, not one soul in all the land to love him; his steadfast spirit gave way at last, and sank down on earth to rest as quite overdone, and nothing soothed him now but that which pained. Suddenly this sleep-walking music ceased, and the pause clutched, like a speechless nightmare, tighter at his heart. In the silence he went into the room and said to Lenette, “Take them down what little we have left.” But over the latter words his voice broke and failed, for he saw (by the flare of some potash-burning which was going on opposite) that all her glowing face was covered with streaming, undried tears, though when he came in she pretended to be busily wiping the windowpane dimmed by her breath. She laid the money down on the window. He said, more gently yet, “Lenette, you will have to take it to them now, or they will be gone.” She took it; her eyes worn with weeping met his (which were worn with weeping too); she went, and then their eyes grew well-nigh dry, so far apart were their two souls already.

They were suffering in that terrible position of circumstances when not even a moment of mutual and reciprocal emotion can any longer reconcile and warm two hearts. His whole heart swelled with overflowing affection, but hers belonged to his no more; he was urged at once by the wish to love her, and the feeling that it was now impossible, by the perception of all her shortcomings and the conviction of her indifference to him. He sat down in the window seat, and leaned his head upon the sill, where it rested, as it chanced, upon a handkerchief which she had left there, and which was moist and cold with tears. She had been solacing herself after the long oppression of the day, with this gentle effusion, much as we have a vein opened after some severe contusion. When he touched the handkerchief, an icy shudder crept down his back, like a sting of conscience, but immediately after it there came a burning glow as the thought flashed to his mind that her weeping had been for another person than himself altogether. The singing and the flute now began again (without the harp this time), and floated in the rising, falling waves, of a slow-timed song, of which the verses ended always with the words, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Sorrow now clutched him in her grasp, like some mantle-fish, casting around him her dark and suffocating folds. He pressed Lenette’s wet handkerchief to his eyes hard, and heard (but less distinctly), “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.” Then of a sudden his whole soul melted and dissolved at the thought that perhaps that halting heart of his would let him see no other new year save that of the morrow, and he thought of himself as dying; and the cold handkerchief, wet with his own tears now as well as hers, lay cool upon his burning brow, while the notes of the music seemed to mark like bells each stroke of time, so that its rapid flight was made distinguishable by the ear, and he saw himself asleep in a quiet grave, like one in the Grotto of the Serpents, but with worms in place of the serpents, licking off the burning poison of life.

The music had ceased. He heard Lenette moving in the next room and getting a light; he went to her and gave her her handkerchief. But his heart was so pained and bleeding that he longed to embrace some one, no matter whom; he was impelled to press his Lenette to his heart, his Lenette of the past if not of the present, his suffering, if no longer his loving, Lenette; at the same time he could not utter one word of affection, neither had he the slightest wish to do so. He put his arms round her slowly, unbent, and held her to him, but she turned her head quickly and coldly away as from a kiss which was not proffered. This pained him greatly, and he said, “Do you suppose I am any happier than you are yourself?” He laid his face down on her averted head, pressed her to him again, and then let her away; and this vain embrace at an end, his heart cried, “Gone is gone, and dead is dead.”

The silent room in which the music and the words had ceased to sound was like some unhappy village from whence the enemy has carried off all the bells, and where there is nothing but silence all the day and night, and the church tower is mute as if time itself were past.

As Firmian laid him down on his bed, he thought, “A sleep closes the old year as if it were one’s last, and ushers in the new as it does, our own lives; and I sleep on towards a future all anxiety, vague of form, and darkly veiled. Thus does man sleep at the gate behind which the dreams are barred; but although his dreams are but a step or two—a minute or two—within that gate, he cannot tell what dreams await him at its opening; whether in the brief unconscious night beasts of prey with glaring eyes are lying in wait to dash upon him, or smiling children to come trooping round him in their play; nor if, when the cloudy shapes beyond that mystic door come about him, their clasp is to be the fond embrace of love, or the murderous clutch of death.”

CHAPTER X.

A LONELY NEW-YEAR’S DAY—THE LEARNED SCHALASTER—WOODEN-LEG OF APPEAL—CHAMBER POSTAL DELIVERY—THE 11TH OF FEBRUARY, AND BIRTH-DAY OF THE YEAR 1786.

I really cannot wish my hero a happy new year on a new year’s day when, on his awaking in the morning, he rolls his swollen eyeballs heavily in their sockets towards the dawn, and then buries his worn and stupefied head deep again in his pillow, as he does now. A man who scarcely ever sheds a tear is always attacked in this way by physical, as a consequence of moral, pain. He lay in bed much later than usual, thinking over what he had done, and what he had now to do. He awoke, feeling; much cooler towards Lenette than he had done when he went to bed. When two hearts can no longer be brought together by the influence of some mutual, warm emotion, when the glow of enthusiasm no longer links them together, still less can they mingle and unite when the glow has passed away, and chilly reserve has resumed its sway. There is a certain half-and-half state of partial reconciliation in which the vertical index of the jewel-balance, in its glass-case, is turned by the lightest breath from the tongue of a third person; to-day, alas! the scale on Firmian’s side sunk a little, and that on Lenette’s went down altogether. He prepared himself, however, and dreaded at the same time, to give and to return the new year greetings. He took heart, and entered the room with his usual hearty step, as if nothing had happened. She had let the coffee-pot turn into a refrigerator rather than call him, and was standing with her back to him, at the drawer of the commode, tearing hearts to pieces, to see what was inside them. The hearts in question were printed new year’s wishes in verse, which she had received, in happier days, from her friends in Augspurg; the kindly wishes were hidden behind groups of hearts clipped out and twined together in spiral lines. As the Holy Virgin gets behung with “assignat” hearts of wax, so do other virgins with paper ones; for with these fair maidens all warmth and enthusiasm gets the name of “heart,” much as map-makers fancy that the outline of burning Africa has a considerable resemblance to a heart.

Firmian could well divine how many a longing sigh the poor soul had heaved over so many a ruined wish and hope, and all her mournful comparisons of the present time—with those smiling days gone by—and all that sorrow and the memory of the past spake to the gentle, tender heart. Alas! since even the happy greet the new year with sighs, the wretched may well be allowed a tear or two. He said his “good morning” gently, and had he received a gentle answer, would have gone so far as to add his wishes to the stock of printed ones; but Lenette, who had been oftener hurt, and more deeply too, on the previous day, than he had, snarled back at him a cold and hasty reply. So that he could not offer any wishes; she offered none; and thus stonily and thus miserably they went elbowing one another through the gate of the new year.

I must say it; he had been looking forward for something like eight weeks to the happiness of this new year’s morning—to the blissful union of their hearts—to the thousands of loving wishes which he would offer—to their close embraces and happy silences of lips upon lips! Ah! how different it all was; cold, deathly cold! On some other occasion, when I have more paper, I must explain at full length why and wherefore his satirical vein served the purpose of a ferment, a leaven or yeast, or, say a kind of irrigating engine to that sensitive heart of his of which he was both proud and ashamed at once. The royal burgh of Kuhschnappel itself had more to do with it than anything else. Upon this town, as upon some others in Germany, the dew of sensibility has never fallen (as if these places were made of metal), whilst their inhabitants have provided themselves with hearts of bone, on which, as on frozen limbs, and witches bearing the stigmata of the devil, it is impossible to inflict wounds of any consequence to speak of. Amid a population possessed of this sort of frigidity, one is, of course, inclined to pardon—and even go out of one’s way in search of—a little warmth, even of an exaggerated kind,—whereas a man who had been living about 1785 in Leipzig, where nearly all hearts and arteries were injected full of the spirit of tears, might have been disposed to carry his humorous indignation at that circumstance a little too far, in the same way that cooks dish up watery vegetables with more pepper in wet weather than in dry.

Lenette went three times to church that day, not that there was anything extraordinary in that. It is not so much with respect to the church-goers that the words “three times” in this connection, alarming as they are, horrify one. The church-goers may sometimes, perhaps, be all the better for going so often; but it is for the sake of the unfortunate clergy who are obliged to preach so many times in one day, that they may think themselves lucky if all that happens to them is that they go to the devil and don’t lose their voices into the bargain. The first time a man preaches, he certainly moves himself more than anybody else, and becomes his own proselyte; but when it comes to the millionth time or so of his laying down the moral law, it must be much the same with him as with the Egerian peasants, who drink the Egerian waters every day, and consequently cease to be susceptible to their derivative qualities, however visitors may be affected by them.

At dinner our melancholy pair sat silent, except that the husband, seeing the wife preparing to go to the afternoon service at church, which she had not been in the habit of attending for some time, asked her who was going to preach. “Most probably Schulrath Stiefel,” she said, although he usually preached only in the morning, but just now the evening preacher couldn’t preach, he had received “a chastisement from God—he had put out his collar-bone.” At another time Siebenkæs would have had a good deal to say as touching the latter clause of her sentence; but on the present occasion (circumstances being as they were), all he did was to strike his plate with one of the prongs of his fork, and then hold it up to one of his ears, while he stopped the other; this droning bass, this humming harmony, bore his tortured soul away upon the waves of music, and this echoing sound-board, this vibrating bell-tongue, seemed to be singing to him (by way of new year’s greeting), “Hearest thou not the distant bell ringing at the close of thy chill life’s high mass? The question is, shalt thou, when next new year’s day comes, be able to hear; or lying, by that time, crumbling into dust?”

After dinner he looked out of window, directing his gaze less to the street than to the sky. There, as it chanced, he saw two mock suns, and almost in the zenith the half of a rainbow with a paler one intersecting it. These tinted stars began strangely to sway his soul, making it sad, as if he saw in them the reflected image of his own dim, pale, shattered life. For to man, when swayed by emotion, Nature is ever a great mirror, all emotion too; it is only to him who is satisfied and at rest that she seems nothing but a cold, dead window between him and the world beyond.

When he was alone in the room after dinner, and the jubilant hymns from the church, and the glad song of a canary in a neighbour’s room came upon his weary soul like the movement and the tumult of all the joy of his youth, now buried alive in the tomb; and when the bright magic sunshine broke into his chamber, and light cloud-shadows slid athwart the spot of light upon the floor, questioning his sick, moaning heart in a thousand melancholy tropes, and saying, “Is it not thus with all things? Are not your own days fleeting by like vapours through a chilly sky, above a dead earth, floating away towards the night?”—he could but open his swelling heart by means of the soft-edged sword of music, that so the nearest and heaviest of the drops of his sorrow might be set free to flow. He struck a single triad chord upon his piano, and struck it once again, letting it gradually die away; the tones floated away as the clouds had, the sweet harmony trembled more slowly and more slowly, grew fainter and fainter, and ceased at last; silence, as of the grave, was all that was left. As he listened, his breath and his heart stopped, a faintness came over him which extended to his very soul; and then—and then—as floods wash the dead from out of the churches and the graves, in this morbid hour of dreams, the stream of his heart came flowing again, and bearing upon its billows a new corpse from out the future, torn all unshrouded from its earthly bed; it was his own body; he was dead. He looked out of window towards the comforting and reassuring light and star of life, but the voice within him cried on still, “Do not deceive thyself; before the new year’s wishes are said again, thou wilt have departed hence.”

When a shivering heart is thus all shorn of its leaves and standing bare, every breeze that touches it is a freezing blast. With what a soft, warm, gentle touch Lenette would have had to touch it so as not to startle it. A heart in this condition is like a clairvoyante, who feels a chill as of death in every hand which touches from beyond the charmed circle.

He determined to join the corpse-lottery (as it was called) that very day, so as to be able at all events to pay the toll or tax on his departure for the next world. He told Lenette so, but she thought this was only another of his harpings on the subject of the mourning dress. Thus cloudily passed the first day of the year, and the first week was even more rainy. The garden-hedge and fencing round Lenette’s love for Stiefel were completely cut down and pulled up now, and the love was to be clearly seen of every passer-by. Every evening at the time when the Schulrath used formerly to come, vexation and regret graved a deeper furrow on her round young face, which as time went on turned wholly into a piece of carving fretted by the hand of grief. She found out the days when he was to preach, so that she might go and hear him, and whenever a funeral passed, she went to the window to see him. The bookbinder’s wife was her “corresponding member,” from whom she constantly drew fresh discoveries concerning the Schulrath, and repeated the old ones with her over and over again. What an amount of warmth the Schulrath must have gained by reason of his focal distance, and her husband have lost on account of his proximity will be at once apparent; just as the earth derives least warmth from the sun when they are nearest together, i. e. in winter! Moreover another event came just then to pass which increased Lenette’s aversion. Von Blaize had secretly circulated a report that Siebenkæs was an atheist and no Christian. Respectable old maiden ladies and the clergy, form a charming contrast to the vindictive Romans under the Empire, who often accused, the most innocent people possible of being Christians, in order that they might obtain a martyr’s crown. The old maids and parsons aforesaid rather take the part of a man who is in a position of this kind, and deny that he is a Christian; and in this they contrast, likewise with the Romans and Italians of the present day, who always say “there are four Christians here,” when they mean “four men.” In St. Ferieux, near Besançon, the most virtuous girl used to be presented with a lace veil of the value of five shillings by way of a prize; and people like Blaize are fond of throwing a prize for virtue of this kind, namely, a moral veil, over the good. This is why they are fond of calling thinking men infidels, and the heterodox wolves, whose teeth help to smooth and polish,—which is the reason why wolves are engraved upon the best steel blades.

When Siebenkæs first told his wife this report of Blaize’s (that he was no Christian, if not, indeed, altogether an infidel), she didn’t pay very much attention to it, inasmuch as it seemed out of the question such a thing could be true of a man to whom she had united herself in the holy state of matrimony. It was not until sometime afterwards that she remembered that, one month when there had been a long period of dry weather he had spoken disparagingly (without the least hesitation), not only of the Roman Catholic processions (for she did not think THEY WERE of very much use herself), but concerning the Protestant’s prayers for rain, inquiring, “Do the processions, miles long, in the Arabian deserts, which go by the name of caravans, ever lead to the production of a single cloud in the sky, let them pray for rain as hard as they choose?” And “Why do the clergy get up processions only for rain or fine weather? why not to get rid of a severe winter, when at all events those who took part in the processions would feel a little warmer; or, in Holland, for bright sunny weather and the dispersion of fog; or against the aurora-borealis in Greenland?” “But what he wondered at most,” he said, “was why those converters of the heathen, who pray so often, and with so much success for the sun when he’s only behind a cloud or two, should not supplicate for him in circumstances of infinitely greater importance—in the polar regions, namely, where for months at a time he never appears even when the sky is altogether cloudless? Or why,” he asked in the last place, “do they take no steps to petition against the great solar eclipses (which are seldom very enjoyable occurrences), suffering themselves to be outdone by savage nations in this respect, for as the latter do howl and pray them away?” Many speeches, in themselves innocuous at first, nay sweet, acquire poisonous properties in the storehouse of time, as sugar does when kept for thirty years in a warehouse.[^[56]] These few words, candidly spoken out in the course of common conversation, took a great hold upon Lenette now that she sate under Stiefel’s pulpit (made of apostles all carpentered up together), and heard him offering up one prayer after another, for, or against (as the case might be), sickness, government, child-birth, harvest, &c., &c.! How dear, on the other hand, Peltzstiefel grew to her; his very sermons became, in the most charming manner, regular love-letters to her heart. And indeed clericality does, at all times, stand in a very close relation to the feminine heart; that’s why “hearts” formerly meant the clergy on German playing cards.

Now what all this time did Stanislaus Siebenkæs think and do? Two contradictory things. If a hard word escaped him, he was sorry for the feeble, forsaken soul, whose whole rose-border of enjoyment had been hoed up, whose first love for the Schulrath lay languishing in sorrow and famine; for the thousand charms of that imprisoned nature of hers would have opened in all their beauty to some heart she loved, which his was not. “And can I not see,” he said further, “how impossible it is that the pin’s or needle’s point can act as a lightning conductor to the sultry, lightning-charged clouds of her life, in the same way that the pen’s point does for mine. One can WRITE a good deal of one’s mind, but one can’t stitch very much off it. And when I consider what swimming-belts and cork-jackets for the deepest floods I am prepared with, in the shape of the self-contemplation of the Emperor Antoninus and in Arrianus Epictetus, of neither of whom she knows even the binding, let alone the name (to say nothing of my astronomy and psychology); and what splendid hands at the fire engine-pumps they are to me when I blaze up in a conflagration of anger as I did just now, while she has to let her anger burn itself out, verily I ought to be ten times more gentle with her, instead of being ten times more irritable.” If it happened, on the other hand, that he had not given but had received a few hard words, he thought of her warm longing for the Schulrath which she could so readily increase and magnify in secret during her wholly mechanical work, to any extent; and of the continual yielding of his own too soft heart; a thing for which his strong-souled Leibgeber would have scolded him, while his wife would have done so for the contrary defect, which she was not likely to encounter in her stiff unyielding Stiefel, judging by the recent unceremoniousness of style in which he, the other day, gave his notice of the calling in of his capital of Regard.

In this frame of mind, one day when his spirit was heavy with anger, he put to her, as she was starting again to go to the Schulrath’s evening sermon, the simple little question, why it was she used formerly to go so seldom to the evening service, and now went so often? She answered that it was because the evening preacher, Mr. Schalaster, always used to preach in the evenings, but that since he had put out his collar-bone the Schulrath had taken his duty. Heaven forbid that she should go to the evening services when Mr. Schalaster’s collar-bone was well again. By slow degrees he drew out of her that she considered this young Mr. Schalaster a most dangerous disseminator of false doctrine, a man who by no means adhered to Luther’s bible, but believed in Mosheh, and in Jesos Christos, Petros and Paulos, and, in fact, os’d all the Apostles in such a manner as to be an offence to all Christian folks; nay he had gone the length of naming the Holy Jerusalem in such an extraordinary way that she couldn’t so much as say it after him; it was soon after this that he had put out his collar-bone, but far be it from her to judge the man. “No, don’t, dear,” her husband said, “perhaps the young gentleman may be a little nearsighted, or he mayn’t know his Greek Testament so well as he ought, the u’s in it are sometimes a good deal like o’s. Ah! how many Schalasters there are who do in their several sciences and doctrines, say Petros for Petrus, and where there’s not the slightest occasion, and nothing in the shape of a stumbling-block in the path, breed dissension among mankind by means of consanguineous vowels.”

On this particular occasion, however, Schalaster drew our couple a little nearer together again. It was a satisfaction to Siebenkæs to find that he had been a little mistaken up to this point, and that it was not only love to Stiefel which had taken her to evening church, but that regard for purity of doctrine had something to do with it as well. The distinction was fine, it is true; but in time of need one catches at the minutest fragment of comfort; and Siebenkæs was delighted that his wife wasn’t quite so deeply in love with the Schulrath as he had been supposing. Let no one hear speak despairingly of the delicate gossamer web which supports us and our happiness. If we do spin and draw it out of ourselves, as the spider does hers, yet it bears us pretty firmly up, and, like the spider, we hang safe and sound in the middle of it, while the storm-wind rocks both our web and us uninjured to and fro.

From this day Siebenkæs went straightway back to his only friend in the place, Stiefel, whose little mistake he had forgiven from his heart long long since—half an hour after it happened, I believe. He knew that the sight of him would be a consolation to the exiled evangelist in his Patmos-chamber, and that his wife would find a consolation in it too. Yea, he carried greetings which had never been intrusted to him backwards and forwards between the two.

The little scraps of news of the Schulrath, which he would let drop of an evening, were to Lenette as the young green shoots which the partridge scratches up from beneath the snow. At the same time, I am not concealing the fact that I am very sorry both for him and for her; although I am not such a wretched partisan of either as to withhold my love and my sympathy from two people who are mutually misunderstanding and making war upon each other.

Out of this grey sultry sky, whose electrical machines were being charged fuller and fuller every hour, there broke, at last, a first harsh peal of thunder—Firmian lost his law suit. The Heimlicher was the catskin rubber, the foxtail switch, which charged the Inheritance Chamber, the goldsmith’s pitch-cake of Justice, full of pocket-lightning. But the suit was adjudged to be lost on the simple ground that the young notary, Giegold, with whose notarial instrument Siebenkæs had armed himself, was not as yet duly matriculated. There cannot be very many persons unaware that in Saxony no legal instrument is valid unless drawn up by a notary who has been duly matriculated, while, at the same time, documentary evidence can be of no greater force in another country than of that which it possessed in the country where it was drawn up. Firmian lost his suit, and his inheritance along with it. However, the latter remained untouched, for, perhaps, nothing can keep a sum of money safer from the attacks of thieves, clients, and lawyers, than the fact of its being the subject of a lawsuit—nobody can touch it then. The sum is clearly specified in all the documents, and these documents would have, themselves, to be got out of the way before the money could be got at. Similarly, the good man of the farm rejoices when the weevil has papered his cornricks all over with white, because then the corn which has not had the heart of it eaten out by the spinner is safe against the ravages of all other corn worms.

A lawsuit is never more easily won than when it is lost—one lodges an appeal. After payment of the costs, ordinary and extraordinary, the law concedes the beneficium appellationis (benefit of appeal to a higher tribunal), although this benefit-farce cannot be of much avail to anybody who has not had certain other benefits conferred upon him beforehand.

Siebenkæs had the right to appeal; he could with ease adduce evidence of his name and wardship through a duly matriculated Leipzig notary. All he wanted was the worktool—the weapon for the fight, which was also the subject of it—to wit, money. During the ten days which the appeal (fœtus-like) had wherein to come to maturity, he went about sickly and thoughtful. Each of these decimal days exercised upon him one of the persecutions of the early Christians and decimated his hours of happiness. To apply to his Leibgeber, in Bayreuth, for money, the distance was too long and the time too short; for Leibgeber, to judge by his silence, had probably leapt ever many a mountain on the leaping-pole, the climbing-spurs, of his silhouette-clipping. Firmian cast everything to the winds, and went to his old friend, Stiefel, that he might comfort himself and tell all the story. Stiefel fumed at the sight of marshy bottomless paths of the law, and pressed upon Siebenkæs the acceptance of a pair of stilts whereon to traverse them, namely, the money necessary for the appeal. Ah! this to the disconsolate, longing, Schulrath was almost tantamount to another clasp of Lenette’s beloved, clinging hand; his honest blood, coagulated by all these days of mere icy cold, thawed once more and began to flow. It was through no cheating of his sense of honour that Firmian, who preferred starving to borrowing, at once accepted Stiefel’s money, looking upon each dollar as a little stone wherewith to pave the path of the law, and so pass over it unbemired. His principal idea was that he would soon be dead, and that, at all events, his helpless widow would have the enjoyment of his inheritance.

He appealed to the Supreme Court and ordered another instrument to be drawn up in Leipzig.

These fresh nail-scratches of fortune, on the one hand, and Stiefel’s kindness and money, on the other, laid up a fresh accumulation of oxygenous, or acidifying, matter in Lenette, and, at the same time, the acid of her ill-humour became (as acids in general do) stronger in a time of frost, and on this subject I shall here communicate the few meteorological observations which I have to make.

They are as follows:—Since the misunderstanding with Stiefel, Lenette was mute the whole day long, recovering from this lingual paralysis only in the presence of strangers. I presume there must exist some physical cause for the phenomenon that a woman is frequently unable to speak except in the presence of strangers, and we should be able to discover the reason of the converse phenomenon, that a mesmerized subject can converse only with the mesmerizer or with persons who are en rapport with him. In St. Kilda everybody coughs when a stranger arrives in the island, and although coughing is not exactly speaking, perhaps, yet it is a preliminary whirring of the wheels of the mechanism of speech. This periodic or intermittent dumbness, which, perhaps, like the non-periodic or continued form of the complaint may be the result of the suppression of (surface) outbreaks, is nothing new to the medical world. Wepfer mentions the case of a paralytic woman who could say nothing except the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed; and cases of dumbness are of frequent occurrence in matrimonial life, in which the wife can say nothing to the husband beyond a word or two of the extremest necessity. There was a fever-patient at Wittenberg who couldn’t speak a word the whole day long except between 12 and 1 o’clock; and we meet with plenty of poor dumb women who are only in a condition to speak for about a quarter of an hour in the course of the day, or can just manage to get out a word or two in the evening, and are obliged to have recourse to dumb-bells by way of helping out their meaning, using for that purpose plates, keys, and doors.

This dumbness, at last, so worked upon poor Siebenkæs that he caught it himself. He mimicked his wife as a father does his children for their good. His satiric humour often had a good deal the appearance of satiric ill-humour; but this was done with the sole view of keeping himself at all times perfectly calm and cool. When chamber-wenches distracted him most utterly as he was in the depths of his auctorial sugar-refinery and beer-brewery, by converting (with Lenette’s assistance) his room into a regular herald’s chancellery and orator’s tribune, he could always bring his wife, at all events, down from the platform by striking three blows on his desk with his bird-sceptre (this was by virtue of an arrangement which he had come to with her on the subject). Also, on the many occasions when he would find himself sitting over against these talking Cicero-heads, powerless to frame an idea, or to write a line, and regretting the loss (not so much to himself as to the innumerable mass of persons of the highest condition and intelligence) of the thousands of ideas which were thus abstracted by these adepts in the art of talk—he could give a tremendous thump with his sceptre-ruler, upon the table, such as one gives to a pond to make the frogs cease croaking. What pained him most with regard to this robbery of posterity was the thought that his book would go down to it shorn of its fair and due proportions as a consequence of all this fugitive chatter. It is a beautiful thing that all authors, even those who deny the immortality of their own souls, seldom have anything to say against that of their names. As Cicero declared that he would believe in the second life, even were there none, they cleave to a belief in the second, eternal, life of their names, however their critics may demonstrate the contrary.

Siebenkæs now most distinctly intimated to his wife, that he should not speak any more at all, not even concerning matters of the utmost necessity, and this because he simply could not and would not be distracted or chilled in the fervour of composition, by long angry discussions concerning talking, washing, or the like, neither be induced to lose his temper with her about such matters. Any given matter of perfect indifference can be spoken of in ten different tones and mistones, and, therefore, with the view of not depriving his wife of whatever enjoyment she might derive from speculating as to the tones in which things were capable of being said, he gave her to understand that for the future he would speak to her only in writing.

I am ready, here, with an explanation of the fullest description as to this proceeding. That grave and earnest person, the bookbinder, was exercised in his mind, all through the ecclesiastical year, by nothing to such an extent as by the conduct of his “Rascal,” as he styled his son, a bit of a mauvais sujet, who was a better hand at reading a book than at binding one—always clipping the edges askew, or cropping them too closely, or doubling or halving the dimensions of the damp sheets by screwing the press too tight. Now these were matters of a sort which his father could by no means endure, and he lost his temper over them to such an extent that he would not speak to this child of the devil and his realm, not so much as a syllable. Such sumptuary laws and golden rules connected with bookmaking, therefore, as he had to communicate to his son he delivered to his wife, in her capacity of postmistress, and she (using her needle by way of rod of office) would then get up in her distant corner of the room and transmit the commands of the father to the son, who would be planing away at no very great distance. The son, who had to deliver all his questions and answers to the postmistress in the same manner, approved of this arrangement most thoroughly; his father’s tongue gave much less trouble than before. The father got into the habit of this system and ceased to treat of anything by word of mouth, no matter what. He even got to trying to express his views concerning his son’s proceedings by means of looks, darting burning glances at him, like a lover, as he sat opposite to him. An eye full of glances, however (notwithstanding the fact that there are ocular letters, as well as palatals, labials, and glossals), is at best but a box of confused pearl type. But as, by good fortune, the invention of writing, and the institution of the post-office have enabled a man, who is drifting round the North Pole on a slab of ice, to communicate with another who is sitting in a palm-tree amidst parrots in the torrid zone—this father and son (when, thus divided, they sat opposite to one another at the work-table) were provided with a means of sweetening and lightening their separation by help of an epistolary correspondence carried on across the table. Business letters of the utmost importance were conveyed from one to the other unsealed, and in complete safety, for the mail bags, the mail-packet of this penny-post, consisted of a pair of fingers. The interchange of letters and couriers between these two silent powers took place over roads so smooth, and by such an admirable system of “Poste aux Anes” without interruption and free from all delay, that the father could, without difficulty, receive a reply on a subject of importance from his correspondent within one minute of its despatch (such was the facility of communication), in fact, they were quite as near to one another as if they had been next door neighbours. I would here beg any traveller who may visit Kuhschnappel before I do so to saw off the two corners of the table, of which the one served as Bureau d’Intelligence to the other, put both these bureaux in his pocket and exhibit them to the curious in some great city or company—or to me in Hof.

Siebenkæs partially copied the bookbinder’s system. He cut out brief letters of decretal in anticipation, to be ready for the occasions when they should be required. If Lenette put an unforeseen question to which there wasn’t an answer in his letter-bag, he would write three lines and pass them across the table. Such notes of hand or orders in council as had to be renewed daily, he ordered the return of in a standing requisition, so as to save paper, and not be obliged to write a fresh order on this subject every day; for he merely passed this particular paper back across the table again. But what said Lenette to all this? I shall be better able to answer this question after relating what follows here. There was only one occasion on which he spoke in this deaf and dumb institution of a house of his; it was while he was eating salad out of an earthenware-dish, which had poetical as well as pictorial flowers on it by way of ornament. Lifting the salad with his fork, he disclosed to view the little carmen which bordered this dish, and which ran as follows:—

“Peace feeds, but strife
Consumes our life.”

Whenever he lifted up a forkful of his salad, he was in a position to read one or the other foot of this didactic poem; and he did so aloud.

“Well, and what said Lenette to all this?” we inquired above. Not a word, I answer. She wasn’t going to let his sulks and silence diminish hers in the slightest degree, for in the end it seemed clear to her that he was holding his tongue out of sheer ill-temper, and she wasn’t going to be outdone by him in that respect. And, in fact, he carried matters further and further every day, continually passing new broken tables-of-the-law across the table to her, or carrying them round to her side. I shall not catalogue the whole of them, but merely quote a few specimens, e. g. ‘The Forty-eight-pounder Paper’ (he gratified himself by continually inventing new titles for these missives), of which the contents were: “Stop the mouth of that tall sewing creature there, who sees perfectly well how busy I am with my writing, or I shall seize her by that throat with which she’s baiting me.”

“The ‘Official Gazette’ paragraph:”—“Let me have a little drop of some of your dirty wash-water; I want to get the ink off these raccoon paws of mine.” “The Pastoral Letter:”—“I want to get a glance or so at ‘Epictetus on what Man has to endure,’ could I find a moment of some sort of peace; don’t disturb me.” “The Pin-paper:”—“I happen to be in the middle of a satire, of the hardest and severest nature, on the subject of women; take that screeching bookbinderess down stairs to the hairdresseress, and yell away there as sprightlily as ye have a mind.” “Torture-bench Note,” or rather “Folio:”—“I have held out, this forenoon, through well-nigh as much as is possible; I have fought my course through besoms, feather-dusters, women’s bonnets, and women’s tongues. Is there no hope that, now that evening is falling, I may have a little, brief hour of peace, in which to try to get some slight idea of the sense of these terrible Acts of Parliament before me here?” Nobody can convince me that it was any blunting of the stings of these visiting cards of his (which he left upon her so very frequently), that he occasionally translated writing into speech, and when other people were present, jested with them concerning cognate subjects. Thus he said on one occasion to Meerbitzer, the hairdresser, in Lenette’s presence, “Monsieur Meerbitzer, it’s incredible what my housekeeping costs in the course of the year. Why, that wife of mine, there as she stands, gets through half-a-ton of food or so by herself alone, and” (when she and the barber both beat their hands together above their heads) “so do I, too.” He showed it to Meerbitzer, printed in Schötzer’s book, that every one does consume about that quantity of sustenance in the course of the year; but did anybody in that room fancy such a thing was possible?

Ill-will towards a person is a kind of catalepsy of the mind, and so is sulking; and in this mental catalepsy, as in the bodily, every limb remains immovably fixed in the position which it chanced to be in when the attack came on. Moreover, mental catalepsy has this feature in common with corporeal—that women are more subject to it than men. Consequently the only effect upon Lenette of her husband’s little joke (which had the outward semblance of being a piece of ill temper, although it was in reality only carried on with a view to the complete maintaining of his own calmness and self-control) was to redouble her stiffness and chilliness. Yet how very little she would have minded it had she but seen Stiefel even once in the course of the week, and had not the cares connected with those house expenses of hers (which melted down and swallowed up all the pewter-plattery of the eagle’s perch) decomposed and dried up the very last drop of happy warm blood in her wretched heart. Ah! sorrow-laden soul! But, as things were, there was no help for her, nor any for him whom she so terribly misunderstood.

Poverty is the only burden which grows heavier in proportion to the number of dear ones who have to help to bear it. Had Firmian been alone, he would scarcely have so much as glanced at the holes and ruts in the streets of life; for destiny lays down little piles of stones for us every thirty steps with which we may fill the holes up. And he had a haven of refuge, a diving-bell, to fly to in the strongest gale that might blow—in the shape of his watch (to say nothing of his glorious philosophy), which he could always turn into cash. But that wife of his, and all her funereal music and Kyrie Eleisons, and a thousand things besides, and Leibgeber’s inexplicable silence, and his growing ill-health—the continual immixture of all these impure matters into the breeze of his life converted it into a sultry, unnerving sirocco blast—a wind which creates in a man a dry, hot, sickly thirst, which often makes him put that into his breast which soldiers put into their mouths to cure bodily thirst, namely, cold powder and lead.

On the 11th of February, Firmian sought relief.

On the 11th of February, Euphrosyne’s day, 1767, Lenette was born.

She had often mentioned this to him, and oftener yet to her sewing-customers. However, he would have forgotten all about it but for the Superintendent-General Ziethen, who had printed a book in which he reminded him of the 11th of February. The superintendent had given due notice, in this work of his, that on the 11th of February, 1786, a segment of South Germany would be sent down, by an earthquake, into the realms below, like so much corn laid by a summer storm. As a consequence, the Kuhschnapplers would have been lowered, upon the dropped coffin-cords or lowered drawbridges of sinking soil, into hell by entire companies at a time, instead of going there as single envoyés, as theretofore was the usage. However, nothing came of all this.

On the day before the earthquake, and before Lenette’s birthday, Firmian repaired to the lifting-crane—the springboard of his soul—namely, the old height where his Henry had taken his farewell. The forms of his friend and wife stood, dim and vague, before his soul’s sight. He thought upon the circumstance that since his friend had left him there had been about the same number of ruptures and divisions in his married life as, according to Moreri, took place in the Church from the time of the Apostles down to Luther’s days, namely, 124. Labourers, innocent and simple, silent and happy, were smoothing the spring’s path. He had passed by gardens where they were clearing the moss and the autumn-leaves away from the trees—by beehives and vine-stocks being transplanted, cleaned, pruned—by osiers being trimmed and dressed. The sun shone bright and warm over the land, all rich with buds; and suddenly he was struck by one of these sensations which often come upon imaginative men—and this is why these are somewhat apt to be a little fanciful and visionary—it seemed to him as if his life dwelt, not in a bodily heart, but in some warm and tender tear, as if his heavy-laden soul were expanding and breaking away through some chink in its prison, and melting into a tone of music—a blue æther wave.

“I must and will forgive her, on her birthday,” cried his softened heart and soul; “I have little doubt that I have been too hard upon her all this time.” He resolved that he would have the Schulrath into the house, and the calico-gown beforehand, and make her a birthday present of the pair, and of a new sewing-cushion. He grasped his watch-chain and pulled out that Elijah’s and Faust’s mantle, which was to bear him away over all his ills by being converted into cash. He went home with every corner of his heart glowing with sunshine, artfully made his watch stop, and told Lenette he must take it to the watchmaker’s to be repaired (and indeed its movements hitherto had been like those of the planets above us, a forward movement at the beginning of the terrestrial or clock-day, afterwards stationary, and latterly retrograde). In this fashion he concealed his projects from her. He took the watch himself to the market-place and sold it, though he knew very well he would never be able to write with comfort unless it was ticking on his table (like the nobleman mentioned by Locke, who could only dance in one particular room, in which there was an old box standing). Also, in the evening, the redeemed, checked shirt-of-blood, or seedbag of evil weeds, was clandestinely introduced into the house. Towards evening Firmian went to the Schulrath, and with all the warmth of his eloquent heart told him of his resolve and everything connected with it—the birthday, the return of the calico, his request to him to come and see them again, his own imminent death, and his resignation to everything. Warm breath of life was breathed into Stiefel, long languishing in absence and love (which, together, had gnawed him into paleness, as lime does the shadows of a fresco), when he heard that on the morrow the beloved voice of his Lenette, longed for during all this weary time (she could hear his, by-the-by, in church, of course), would once more stir the chords of his being.

I must here just glance at a defence, for a moment, as well as an accusation. The former relates to my hero, who seems rather to have rumpled his honour’s patent of nobility to a greater or less extent, by having made this request to Stiefel; but, then, we must consider that his intention in making it was to do a great kindness to his suffering wife, and a small one to himself. The fact is, that the very strongest and roughest of men cannot hold out in the long run against the everlasting feminine sulking and undermining. For the sheer sake of a little peace and quietness, a man who may have sworn a thousand oaths before marriage that he would have his own way in that condition of life, comes, in the long run, to let his wife have hers. The remainder of Siebenkæs’ conduct I have no need to defend, since ’tis not possible to do so, but only necessary. The accusation to which I alluded is against my own fellow-labourers, and it is—that they differ so widely in their romances from this Biography and from real life, in describing the ruptures and reconciliations of their characters as being possible, and as actually occurring, in periods of time so brief that one might stand by and time them with a stop-watch in one’s hand. But a man does not break with a person he loves all in an instant; the rendings alternate with little re-bindings with bands of silk and flowers, till at length the long alternation between seeking and shunning ends in complete separation, and it is then, and not till then, that we wretched creatures are at our wretchedest. The same is generally true of the union of souls; for though at times an unseen infinite Arm seems suddenly to press us upon some new heart, yet we have always long known this heart, in the Gallery of the Saints of our longing devotion and often taken the picture down, uncovered, and adored it. It became impossible to Firmian (sitting in the evening in his lonesome chair of anxiety and suspense) to keep all that love of his waiting with any sort of patience for the morrow. The very restraint which was upon him made his love wax warmer; and when his old familiar fear—that he would die before the equinox came round—fell upon him, it terrified him more than it was wont; but not the thought of death. What shook him was the idea of Lenette’s difficulties, and how she would ever find the money requisite for the performance of the final trial, the anchor-proof[^[57]] of his humanity. As it chanced, he had plenty of money among his fingers at this very moment. He sprang up and ran that very evening to the manager of the corpse lottery, so that, at all events, his wife should be entitled to a capital of fifty florins at his death, and be able to cover his body decently over with a little earth. I don’t know the exact sum he paid; but I am quite accustomed to embarrassments of this description, which novel-writers, who can invent any sum they please in a case of this sort, have no idea of, but which are exceedingly troublesome to a writer of actual biography, who does not put down anything which he is not in a position to substantiate by documentary evidence, and a reference to records.

On the morning of the 11th of February, that is to say on the Saturday, Firmian entered his room, feeling very tender-hearted (for every illness and weakness softens our heart—loss of blood, for instance, and trouble), and all the more so because he was looking forward to a kindly, peaceful day. We love much more warmly when we are looking forward to making somebody happy than we do half an hour after, when we have done it. It was as windy this morning as if the gales were holding tournament, or riding at the ring, or as if Æolus were shooting his winds out of air-guns. Hence many people thought either that the earthquake was beginning, or that a few people here and there had hanged themselves for fear of it. Firmian met a pair of eyes in Lenette’s face, from which, even at that early hour, there had fallen a warm blood-rain of tears, on this first of her days. She had not in the slightest degree guessed at his tenderness towards her, or at that which he had in his mind. She had had no thought of anything of the kind; her only idea had been, “Ah, me! since my poor father and mother have been dead and gone, there is not a soul that ever remembers I have a birthday.” Something or other was evidently pre-occupying her. She looked once or twice, very inquiringly, into his eyes, and seemed to be making up her mind to something; so he put off for a time the outpouring of his full heart, and the unveiling of his twofold birthday-present. At last she came up to him slowly, with the colour in her face, tried in a troubled way to get his hand into hers, and said, with downcast eyes, in which, as yet, there were no tears, “We will be friends again to-day. If you have hurt me, and given me a little pain, what I want is to forgive you from my heart. Do you the same to me.” This address rent his warm breast in twain, and at first all he could do was to be dumb, and clasp her in this silence to his o’er-fraught heart, saying, after a time, “Forgive thou me only! for, ah! I love thee far more than thou lovest me.” And here, at the thought of bygone days, the heavy tear-drops rose from the depths of his laden heart, and flowed, silent and slow, as the deep streams flow. She gazed at him much astonished, saying, “We are going to be friends, then, are we, to-day? and it is my birthday. But, ah, me! it is a sad, sad birthday, too.” It was only at this point that he remembered his birthday-present. He ran and brought it that is to say, the cushion, the calico-dress, and the news that Stiefel was coming in the evening. At this she began to shed tears, and said, “Ah! did you really do all this yesterday? And you remembered that this was my birthday? Oh! it was so kind of you, and I do so thank you for it; particularly—particularly—for the delightful—cushion. I never thought you would remember anything about my wretched birthday at all!” His manly, beautiful soul, which kept no watch upon its enthusiasm (as women’s do), told her everything, including the fact that he had joined the corpse-lottery the day before, so that she might be able to put him under ground at less expense. Her emotion became as strong and as visible as his own. “No, no,” she cried at length, “God will preserve you; but, then, there’s this terrible day; who knows if we shall ever see another morning. Tell me, what does Mr. Stiefel think about the earthquake?” “Don’t distress yourself on that score,” said Firmian; “he says there won’t be anything of the kind.”

Reluctantly he let her away from his glowing heart. Until he went out into the free air (for writing was utterly impossible) he gazed continually upon her bright, shining face, whence all the clouds were quite cleared away. He practised upon himself an old trick he had (which I have learnt from him); when he wished to love some dear person very dearly, and forgive him everything, he looked long on his face. For we (that’s to say he and I) see in a human face, when it is old, the finger-board, the counting board, of all the bitter pains and sorrows which have passed so rudely over it; and when it is young, it is like a bed of flowers on the slope of a volcano, whose next eruption will split it into shivers. Either the future or the past is written on every face—making us gentle and tender, if not sad.

Firmian would have been delighted to have held his new-found, restored Lenette to his heart all the day long; at all events till evening came; but her house-work and other occupations were so many bars’ rest in this music, and her lachrymal ducts were sources of appetite, as well as of tears. And she had not the courage to question him concerning the metallic source of his gold-bearing stream, upon whose gentle waves she was floating now. But her husband gladly divulged the secret of the sale of his watch. The actual estate of matrimony was to-day to him what the pre-nuptial period is always—a cymbale d’amour—having a sounding-board at each of its faces which doubles, not the strings of the instrument, but the tone of those it has. The entire day was like a piece cut out of the full moon, unclouded by the slightest haze, or rather out of the second world, into which the people of the moon themselves proceed. Lenette, in her morning glow, was like the (so-called) Moss of Violet Stone—the Iolite—which gives out the perfume of a miniature-bed of violets, if you but rub it till it gets a little warm.

At evening finally appeared the Rath, all a-shake with agitation. He looked just the least bit haughty, but when he tried to wish Lenette many happy returns of the day, he could not do it for tears, which were in his throat quite as much as in his eyes. His embarrassment served to conceal hers; but at length the opaque mist cleared away from among them, and they were able to look at one another. And then they were very happy; Firmian forced himself to be so; the other two required no constraining.

The heavy storm-clouds, then, ceased for a time to hang and sweep so low, as they had been doing of late, over their comforted, softened hearts. The boding comet of the future was shorn of its sword, and went sweeping on, far brighter and whiter, into the blue expanse of heaven, passing athwart more brilliant constellations. And there came into their evening a brief letter from Leibgeber, of which the joy-bringing lines bedeck and adorn our hero’s evening, as well as our next chapter.

Thus did the quick, transient, quivering Flower-pieces of Fantasy mature in the brains of our triple alliance (as in the reader’s own) into actual and living flowers of joy—as the fever-patient takes the flowers patterned upon his waving bed-curtain to be real and tangible forms. In truth, this winter night, like one of summer, would hardly quite cool down and die out on their horizon, and when they parted at midnight they said, “We have all had a very happy time.”

CHAPTER XI.

LEIBGEBER’S DISQUISITION ON FAME—FIRMIAN’S “EVENING PAPER.”

In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until he has read the following letter of Leibgeber’s:—

“Vaduz February 2, 1786.

“My Firmian Stanislaus,

“In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be there too. I have nothing else of any consequence to write to you now—however, this is quite important enough, namely, that I order you to arrive in Bayreuth upon the first day of the month of gladness, because I have something of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind in my head concerning you, and that as sure as there is a heaven above us. My joy and your happiness depend on your making this journey. I would reveal the whole mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would fall into no hands but your own. Come! You might travel in company with a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of Rosa, who is coming to Bayreuth to fetch his bride home. But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler be that Meyern, of whom you have written to me, and if the said goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather than to warm) his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms (as in Spain they put serpents, something like him, round bottles to cool them), I shall take care, as soon as I get to Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of him, and shall maintain that he’s ten thousand times better than the Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal oftener during his career—two thousand two hundred and thirty-six times, to wit. I have the most anxious and heartfelt longing to behold the Heimlicher von Blaise; were he but a little nearer at hand I should—(seeing that there’s always something sticking in that throat of his which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an inheritance, or somebody else’s house and land),—I say, I should give him a good hard thwack every now and then in the small of his back (by way of a cure) and await the outcome—I mean, of the mouthful. I myself have been limping about the world in all directions, with my silhouette scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz at a studious, bibliothecarian Count’s, who really deserves that I should like him ten times better than I do. But, you see, my fondness for you is fully as much as my heart can hold; and (to speak in general terms) the human race, and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing at, seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every day. I must say to you, ‘Fame may go to the devil!’ I think I shall decidedly dip down, disappear, and get out of the way altogether, almost immediately, run right into the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week under a new name, so that the fools shan’t know who I am. Ah! there were a few years, once on a time, when I really did wish to be something—if not a great author, at least a ninth elector—to be mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled—if not (now and then) to be a pro-rector, certainly (and very often) to be a dean. At that period of my life I should have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the most atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have been able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) an altar or temple in my own honour, higher than the pyramid mentioned by Ruysh in his ‘Cabinet of Natural Science’ as having been constructed of the forty-two gallstones of a certain noble lady. Siebenkæs, in those days I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used to have one of bees)—a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing else but to become famous thereby. ‘I quite admit’ (said I, at the period in question) ‘that it is not accorded to every son of earth (neither should he expect it), as it was to Saint Romuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch his holy body by way of a relic; but he may, I think, without being unduly conceited, entertain a desire that a few hairs, if not of his fur-coat (as of Voltaire’s, in Paris), yet, at all events, of his head, may have the good luck to be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a certain opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)’

“At the time in question I thought as above set forth, but now my views are far more enlightened. Fame is a thing altogether unworthy of fame. I was once sitting, on a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone, considering myself carefully, and I said, ‘Now, is there really anything in the wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Have you any chance of becoming (like the deceased Cornelius Agrippa) Secretary of State for War to the Emperor Maximilian, and Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the Fifth? Will YOU ever hoist yourself up to the position of Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz, Physician in Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of Theology in Pavia? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine is as anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to Agrippa’s? And would it not be ludicrous if you were to give out (and give yourself airs about it) that a Margrave in Italy, and the King of England, the Chancellor Mercurius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria), had all wished to have you in their service in the same year? Wouldn’t it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say nothing of the utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that all these people exploded into the sleeping-powder of death so many years before you flashed up in the shape of the priming and detonating powder of life! In what well-known work (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius style you a portentosum ingenium? What author reckons you among the clarissima sui sæculi lumina? If it had been the case that you stood in extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops—with Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus—wouldn’t Schröckh and Schmidt have mentioned it, en passant, in their “History of the Reformation”? Even supposing that I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the same lot would be mine and his; we should both rot away in obscurity beneath the thicket, and it would be centuries before anybody came to lift the branches and take a look at us.’

“It would do me no more good were I to go about the matter more knowingly, and have myself belauded in the ‘Universal German Library.’ I might stand for many a long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat in that chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the great literati lying and sitting round me on their beds of state—we might all (I say) wait begarlanded there, all alone together in that Temple of Fame of ours for many a long year before a single soul came and opened the door, and looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before me; and our triumphal car would be nothing but a wheelbarrow, on which our temple, with all its riches, should be whirled occasionally to a public auction. Yet I might, perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself immortal, could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality would reach the ears of any but those who are themselves as yet in this mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest gratification when I am compelled to perceive that it is exactly to all the most renowned and celebrated of people, over whose faces the laurel is growing, year by year, in their coffins (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), that I can never be anything but an unexplored Africa—particularly to Shem, Ham, and Japhet; to Absalom and his father; to both the Catos, the two Anthonys, Nebuchadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives; to the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as Taubmann and Eulenspiegel? When a Henry IV., and the four Evangelists, and Bayle (who knows all the rest of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who knows them better still), and Job, the bearer of sorrows—or, at all events, the author of Job—don’t know that there ever was such a thing as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth: when I am, and must ever remain, to a whole bye-gone world (i. e., six thousand years replete with great and grand men and nations), a mathematical point, an invisible eclipse, a wretched je ne sais quoi, I really do not see how posterity (in which there mayn’t be so very much after all), or the next six thousand years, can do anything to speak of by way of compensation.

“Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious heavenly hosts and archangels there are upon other world-balls, and on the little spheres in the milky way—that paternoster bead-chaplet of world-balls—seraphs, compared to whom I cannot be looked upon as anything but a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a considerable extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon earth the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog-soul into a cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a sheep, an ass—aye, or even an ape—and ultimately into a Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose nothing higher than that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins to cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection occurs to one. Among the various individuals which compose a species of animals (among whom there must certainly occur geniuses, good, sound, common-sense intelligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we remark and take notice only of the latter, or, at most, of the extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) is close enough to our retina to admit of our perceiving its delicate middle tints and gradations: and thus must it be with us when some spirit, sitting in heaven, looks at us in the mass. He is so far away, that he will find some trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper distinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses—the Kantists; between Goëthe and his imitators; and will see little or no difference between members of faculty and dunces, professors’ lecture-rooms and lunatic asylums; for little steps are wholly lost to the sight of one who is standing on the uppermost of them.

“Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and courage; and, Siebenkæs, hang me if I ever sit down and grow one bit famous, or give myself the trouble either to build up or to pull down any learned or ingenious system whatever, or write anything at all of greater length than a letter.

“Thy (not my) Self,

“L.

“P.S. I wish it would please God to grant me a second life after this, that I might have the opportunity of dealing with a few realities in the next world; for this one is really altogether too hollow and stupid; a wretched Nürnberg toy; nothing but the falling froth of a life; a jump through the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of Sodom, which, splutter as much as I will, I can’t get out of my mouth. Oh!—”

To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufficiently serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it is too serious, and that it is only an oppressed heart which can jest in this fashion; that it is only an eye which is in much too feverish a condition—with the fireworks of life darting round it like the flying fire-flashes which precede amaurosis—which is capable of seeing and picturing such fever-forms.

Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all events. But I must go back to the 11th of February, in order to half-deprive the reader of his sympathising enjoyment of the re-union of the trefoil of friends which then took place. Lenette’s trembling petition that her husband would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Zichen’s earth-shaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and the ground she stood upon, were about to be let down; and it was at the near approach of death (whom she thought she already saw wagging his tiger’s tail) that she held out to her husband a hand of Christian peace. For (and to) that beautiful soul of his (disembodied) hers wept tears of love and of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, confused her happiness with her love—satisfaction with fidelity; and (it may be suspected) the eagerness with which she was looking forward to enwrapping the Schulrath, that very evening, in a warm and tender—gaze, found outward expression in the shape of an unusual degree of affection for her husband. It is here most essential that I should communicate to all and sundry persons one of the most valuable of all my maxims; in dealings with even the very best woman in the world, it is of the utmost importance that we should make excessively certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, what it is which she really wants (at the time being), and particularly whom—(this is not always the person who is thus discriminating). There is in the female heart such a rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of emotions of every kind; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances to be nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she sheds a tear for you out of her left eye, go on thinking, and drop another for your predecessor or successor (as the case may be) out of her right. Also a feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband’s share; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps more at what she thinks than at what she hears.

’Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among us are stupid precisely on this point; that a woman thinking (as she does) more of other people’s feelings than of her own, is, in this matter, neither the deceiver nor the deceived; what she is is the deception itself—the optical deception and the acoustic.

But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of this sort concerning elevenths of February until the twelfth. Wendeline was in love with the Schulrath; that was the fact of the matter. Like all women of any sense (in Kuhschnappel), she had believed in the superintendent-general, and in the kick he had administered to the earth, until Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced the idea of such a thing to be simply impious, when she abandoned the prophetic superintendent and gave in her adhesion to the incredulous worldling, Firmian. We all know that he had every bit as much of the masculine failing of overdoing consistency as she had of the feminine one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, therefore, in him to think that he was going to regain, by means of one grand effusion of the heart, an affection embittered by so many small effusions of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly enthusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of ill-will which has rooted itself all over a person’s heart with a thousand little spreading fibres. The affection which we have deprived ourselves of by means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling, is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of warming.

In a word, it became evident in the course of a day or two that things were just as they had been three weeks before. Lenette’s love had flourished and grown to such an extent, by reason of Stiefel’s absence, that there was not room for it any longer under its bell-glass—it was shooting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open-air. The Aqua Toffana of jealousy at last permeated every vessel in Firmian’s body, flowed into his heart, and gnawed it slowly in pieces. He was but the tree on which Lenette had inscribed her love for another, and was withering by reason of the incisions. He had so hoped that the Schulrath, recalled to them on Lenette’s birthday, would have healed all wounds, however deep; or at all events cicatrized them over: whereas, what he really had done was to open them all wider than ever—all unconscious as he was of it. Ah! what pain this was to the wretched husband! He grew poorer and weaker, and more miserable—both outwardly and inwardly—as the days went by, and gave up all hope of ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, March, and April passed over head—all heavy, dripping clouds, without a single break of blue sky or blink of evening-red.

On the 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second time; and on the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, for ever, his ‘Evening Paper’ (this was the name he gave to his diary, because he wrote it of an evening), meaning to consign that, along with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (as far as they were completed) into Leibgeber’s most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so soon to vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he thought, those hands would fainer clasp his soul (which was in the papers) than his poor meagre body—of which, du reste, Liebgeber always possessed a second unaltered edition (a perfect facsimile copy, so to speak) at all times at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation in here quoting, without emendation, the whole of this concluding page of the ‘Evening Paper’—Firmian’s ‘Swan Song,’ which—which went off by the following post.

“Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the Court of Appeal of the second instance. The defendant’s counsel, and the Court, brought to bear upon me an old Statute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in Bayreuth, which enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not valid—depositions having to be made before the Court. These two hearings of my case render the uphill path to the third a little easier. For my poor Lenette’s sake I have appealed to the Lower House, my kind Stiefel advancing me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to the oracles of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as was de rigueur in consulting the heathen oracles of old. I have reason to hope that I shall be able to effect my escape from the clutches of the knaves of the State;[^[58]] or (shall I say), from these game-keepers and their couteaux de chasse, and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I think I shall get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings, the toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament—not by my purse (which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect’s feeler, and could be drawn, like a leather queue, through the smallest mesh in any of their legal nets)—but with my body, which, as it approaches the topmost of their nets will be turned into dust of death, and will then fly free through and over every trap they can set.

“I desire to lift my hand away from this, my evening paper, to-night for the last time, ere it becomes an absolute martyrology. If one could give away his life as a gift, I should be very happy to give mine to any dying person who would care to accept it. At the same time, let nobody suppose that because there chances to be a total eclipse of the sun above my head, I think, for a moment, that there must be one in America as well; or that I imagine the Gold Coast must be snowed up for the winter because a snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of my own nose. Life is warm and beautiful; even mine was so once. If it must be that I am to melt away, even before these snowflakes, I beg of my heirs, and of all Christian people, that they will not publish any part of my selection from the ‘Devil’s Papers,’ except that which I have copied out fair, which extends as far as the ‘Satire upon Women’ (inclusively). And as regards this diary of mine, in which one or two satirical fancies crop out here and there, I beg, also, that not a single one of these may be put into print.

“Should any curious inquirer into the history of this day-and-night-book of mine be anxious to discover what the heavy weights, the nests, the clothes hung out to dry upon my branches, really consisted of, that they should so bend my top shoot and my branches down (and all the more curious to know it, inasmuch as I have written humorous satires)—(though, indeed, my sole object has been to nourish and support myself by help of these satire prickles of mine, absorbent vessels, to me, like those of the torch-thistle), I beg to inform him that he seeks to know more than I know myself, and more than I mean to tell. For man and the horseradish are most biting when grated; and the satirist is sadder than the jester, for the same reason that the Urang-Utang is more melancholy than the ape, namely, because he is nobler. If this paper does really reach your hands, my Henry, my beloved, and you wish to hear somewhat concerning the hail which has kept falling deeper and deeper upon my young seed-crop—count not the melted hailstones, but the broken stalks. I have nothing left to give me joy, save your affection—everything else is battered down into ruin. Since, for more reasons than one,[^[59]] it is most unlikely that I shall ever come to you at Bayreuth, let us part, on this page, like spirits, giving each other hands of air. I detest the sentimental, but Fate has wellnigh grafted it on to me at last, in spite of myself, and I swallow great spoonsful of that satiric Glauber’s salt, which is generally so good a remedy for it—as sheep, who have caught the rot from feeding in damp meadows, are cured by licking salt. I say I swallow great spoonsful, about the size of my prizes at the bird-shooting, without the least perceptible effect. But, on the whole, it matters little. Fate, unlike our Sheriffs’ Courts, does not wait until we are well before she inflicts her sentence. My giddiness and other premonitory symptoms of apoplexy, give me to understand, with sufficient clearness, that I shall soon be subjected to a good Galenian blood-letting,[^[60]] by way of remedy for the nose-bleedings of this life. I cannot say that I am particularly glad of it, or anxious for it. On the contrary, I am annoyed with people who demand that Fate shall at once unswaddle them (for we are swaddled in our bodies, the nerves and arteries being the swaddling-bands)—as a mother does her infant just because it cries, and has a little pain in its stomach. I should be glad to remain swaddled for a while to come among the rest of the ‘Children of the Rope,’[^[61]] particularly as I cannot but fear that, in the next world, I shall be able to make little or no use of my satirical humour. However, I shall have to go. But when that comes to pass, I should like to ask you, Henry, to come some day to this town, and make them uncover your friend’s quiet face, which will scarce manage to put on the Hippocratic mien again. Then, my Henry, when you gaze long upon the grey, spotty, new moon-face there, and think that very little sunshine ever fell thereon—no sunshine of love, of fame, or fortune—you will not be able to look up to heaven, and cry out to God, ‘And now, at last, after all his sorrows and troubles, Thou, O God, hast annihilated him altogether; when he stretched his arms, in death, towards Thee, and that world of thine, Thou hast broken him in sunder as he lies there—poor soul!’ No, Henry, when I die, you will be compelled to believe in Immortality.

“Now that I have finished this ‘Evening Paper’ of mine, I am going to put out the light, for the full moon is shedding broad, imperial sheets of brightness into the room. Then, as there is no one else awake in the house, I will sit down in the twilight stillness, and, while I gaze at the moon’s white magic amid the black magic of night, and listen to great flocks of birds of passage as they come flying hither from warmer lands through the blue, clear moonlight—while I am passing away into a sister country—I will stretch my feelers out from my snail’s shell once more before the last frost closes it up for ever. Henry, I want to picture to myself to-night, clearly and brightly, all that is now over and past; the May of our friendship—every evening when we were too much moved by emotion and could not but fall into each other’s arms—my hopes, so old and grey now that I hardly know them to be mine—five old, but bright and happy, springs which I still remember—my dead mother, who, when she was dying, gave me a lemon, which she thought would be put into her coffin, and said, ‘Ah, I wish it were going into my bridal garland.’ And I will picture to myself, also, that moment, now so near, of my own death, when thy image will rise before the broken sight of my soul for the last time—when I shall part from thee, and, with a dark, inward pang, which can no more bring a tear into my cold and glazing eyes, sink away from thy shadowy form into the dark, and from amid the thick and heavy clouds of death, call to thee with a faint and hollow cry, ‘Henry, good-night! good-night! Ah, fare thee well! for I can say no more.’”

End of the ‘Evening Paper.’

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CHAPTER XII.

THE FLIGHT OUT OF EGYPT—THE GLORIES OF TRAVEL—THE UNKNOWN—BAYREUTH—BAPTISM IN A STORM—NATHALIE AND THE HERMITAGE—THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATION IN ALL THIS BOOK—AN EVENING OF FRIENDSHIP.

Once, in the Easter week, when Firmian came home from a half-hour’s pleasure-trip full of forced marches, Lenette asked him why he had not come back sooner, because the postman had been with a great, enormous packet, and had said that the husband must sign the receipt for it himself. In a small establishment like Siebenkæs’ an occurrence such as this ranks among the world’s greatest events, or the principal revolutions in its history. The moments of waiting lay on their souls like cupping-glasses and drawing plasters. At length the postman, in his yellow uniform, put an end to the bitter-sweet hemp beating of their arteries. Firmian acknowledged the receipt of fifty dollars, while Lenette asked the postman who had sent them, and where they came from. The letter commenced thus:—

“My dear Siebenkæs,

“I have received your ‘Evening Paper’ and ‘Devil’s Selections’ all safely. The rest by word of mouth.

“Postscript.

“But listen! If the future course of my waltz of life is a matter of the slightest interest to you—if you care in the least degree about my happiness, my plans, or ideas—if it is anything to you but a matter of the supremest indifference that I frank you as far as Bayreuth, providing you with board, lodging, and travelling expenses all on account of a project whose yarn the spinning-mills of the future must either manufacture into gin-snares and gallows-ropes (for my life), or else into rope-ladders and best bower anchor-cables—if this, and other matters more momentous still, have the smallest power over you, Firmian, for heaven’s sake, on with a pair of boots and start!”

---

“And, by thy holy friendship!” said Siebenkæs, “I will on with a pair, though the bolt of apoplexy should flash out of the blue sky of Swabia, and strike me down beneath a cherry-tree in full blossom. Nothing shall prevent me now!”

He kept his word, for in six days from thence we find him, at eleven o’clock at night, ready for his journey, with clean linen on his back, and in his pockets—with a hat-cover on his head (secretly freighted and stuffed with an old soft hat)—his newest boots (the antediluvian pair s relieved from duty, being left behind in garrison)—and a tower-clock, borrowed from Peltzstiefel, in his pocket—and fresh bathed, shaven, and kempt, standing by his wife and friend—both of whom kept their eyes fixed, with a gladsome, courteous watchfulness upon the departing traveller only, and did not, for the time being, look at all at one another. He took his leave of the pair while it was still night, being minded to pass the rest of it in his arm chair (of many sorrows), and be off about three o’clock, while Lenette should still be snoring. He committed to the Schulrath the office of treasurer-in-chief of the widow’s fund to his grass-widow, and the managership, or, at least, the “leading business,” of his miniature Covent Garden full of Gay’s Beggar’s Operas, the theatrical journal whereof I am here writing for the edification of a full half of the world. “Lenette,” he said, “when you want any counsel, apply to the counsellor here; he is going to do me the favour to come and see you very often indeed.” Peltzstiefel made the most solemn promises to come every day. Lenette did not go down stairs to the door with the Schulrath when he went away, as she usually did, but remained above, and drawing her hand out of her replenished money-bag (the starved stomachic coats of which had hitherto been rubbing together), snapped it to. It is not of sufficient importance to be recorded that Siebenkæs asked her to put out the light, and go to her bed, and that he gave her charming face his long parting kiss, and said good night, and took the tender farewell, almost within the Eden-gate of the land of dreams with that redoublement of fondness with which we take our leave of those we love, and greet them when we come back to them again.

The watchman’s last call at length drew him from his sleeping chair out into the starlight, breezy morning; but, first, he crept once more into the bed-room to the rose-maiden dreaming there, warm and happy, pulled the window to (for there was a cool air from it falling upon her unprotected breast), and would not suffer his lips to touch her in an awakening kiss. He gazed at her by the light of the stars and early blush of dawn, till he turned his eyes away (fast growing dim) at the thought, “perhaps I may never see her again.”

As he passed through the sitting-room, her distaff seemed to look at him as if it were a thing of life; it was wrapped in broad bands of coloured paper (which she had put on it because she had not got silk); and there was her spinning-wheel, too, which she used to work at in the dark mornings and evenings when there was not light enough for sewing. As he pictured her to himself working industriously at them while he was away, every wish of his heart cried out, “Ah, poor darling! may all go well with her, always, whether I ever come back to her or not.”

This thought of the last time grew more vivid still when he was out in the open air, and felt a slight giddiness produced, in the physical part of his head, by agitation and broken sleep, as well as natural regret at the sight of his home receding from view, and the town growing dimmer, and the foreground changing into background, and the disappearance of all the paths and heights on which he had so often walked a little life into his benumbed heart, frozen by the past winter. The little leaf whereon, like a leaf roller, or miner-worm, he had been crawling and feeding, was falling now to earth behind him, a skeleton leaf.

But the first spot of foreign, unfamiliar soil, as yet unmarked by any “Station of his Passion,” drew, like a serpent-stone, an acrid drop or two of sorrow-poison out of his heart.

And now the solar flames shot higher and higher up upon the enkindled morning clouds, till, at length, hundreds of suns rose in an instant in the sky, in the streams and pools, and in the dew-cups of the flowers, while thousands of varied colours went flowing athwart the face of earth, and one bright whiteness broke from the sky.

Fate plucked away most of the yellow, faded leaves from Firmian’s soul, as gardeners remove those of plants in spring. His giddiness diminished rather than otherwise as he went on; the walking did it good. As the sun rose in heaven, another, a super-earthly sun, rose in his soul. In every valley, in every grove, on every rising ground, he broke and cast away a ring or two of the chrysalis-case of wintry life and trouble (which had been clinging so tightly to him), and unfolded his moist upper and nether wings, and let the breeze of May waft him away, on four outspread pinions, up into the bright air among the butterflies, but higher than they, and over loftier flowers.

And then with what a burst of power the life within him began, under this new impetus, to boil and seethe, as, issuing from a diamond-mine of a valley all shade and dewdrops, he walked a pace or two up through the heaven-gate of the spring. It was as if some great earthquake had upheaved a new-created flowery plain, all dripping from the ocean, stretching further than the eye could reach, all rich in youthful powers and impulses. The fire of earth glowed beneath the roots of this great hanging garden, and the fire of heaven flamed above it burning the colours into the trees and flowers. Between the white mountains, as between porcelain towers, stood the bright tinted, flowery slopes like thrones for the fruit goddesses. And all over the face of this great camp of gladness, the cups of the flowers and the heavy dewdrops were pitched, like peopled tents. The earth teemed with young broods, and sprouting grasses, and countless little hearts; and heart after heart, life after life, burst forth into being from out the warm brooding-cells of Mother Nature—burst forth with wings, or silken threads, or delicate feelers—and hummed, and sucked, and smacked its lips and sang. And for every one of these countless honeysucking trunks a cup of gladness had long since been filled and ready.

In this great market-place of this living city of the sun, so full of glory and sounding life, the pet child of the infinite Mother stood solitary—gazing, with bright and happy eyes, delighted, around him into all its innumerable streets. But his eternal Mother wore her veil of immeasurable immensity, and it was only the warmth which pierced to his heart which told him that he was lying upon her breast. Firmian reposed from this two hours’ intoxication of heart in a peasant’s hut. The foaming spirit of a cup of joy like this went quicker to the heart of a sick man such as he than to those of the commoner run of sufferers.

When he went out again the glory had sobered down into brightness, and his enthusiasm into simple happiness. Every red ladybird fluttering on its way, every red church-roof, and every sparkling stream as it glittered and glistened with dancing stars, shed joyous lights and brilliant colours upon his soul. When he heard the cries of the charcoal burners in the wood, the resounding cracking of whips, and the crash of falling trees, and then, when coming out into the open, he saw the white châteaux and roads standing out against the dark-green background like constellations and milky ways, and above the shining cloud specks in the deep blue sky; while lights flashed and darted everywhere, now down from trees, now up from streams, now athwart saws in the distance—there was no such thing as a foggy corner left in his soul, nor a single spot in it all unpenetrated by the spring sunshine: the moss of gnawing, corroding care, which can grow only in damp shade, fell from his bread-trees and trees of liberty out here in the glad, free air, and his soul could not but join in the great chorus of flying and humming creatures which was rising all round him, singing, “Life is beautiful, and youth is lovelier still; but spring is loveliest of all.”

The bygone winter lay behind him like the dark, frozen South Pole; the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel like some deep, dreary school-dungeon with dripping walls. The only spot in it over which broad, gladsome sunbeams were intertwining was his own home, and he pictured to himself Lenette in that home as commander-in-chief, free to talk, cook, and wash at her own sweet will, and with her head (and hands, too) full all day long of the delight that was coming in the evening. He was glad from the very depths of his heart that, in that little egg-shell of hers, that sulphur-hut and chartreuse, she should enjoy the glory and brightness which that angel Peltzstiefel would bring with him into her St. Peter’s prison. “Ah! in God’s name,” thought he, “may she be as happy as I am—nay, and happier, too, if that be possible.”

The more villages he came to, with their troupes of strolling players (of inhabitants), the more did life in general seem to assume a theatrical guise—his past troubles were transformed into leading parts in the drama, or Aristotelian problems—his clothes into stage costumes—his new boots became cothurna—and his purse a theatre treasury—while a delicious stage-recognition was awaiting him in the arms of his beloved Henry.

About half-past three in the afternoon, in a Swabian village, whose name he did not inquire, his whole soul melted of a sudden to tears, so that he was completely astonished at the unlooked-for and rapid attendrissement. His surroundings at the time would have rather led him to anticipate a contrary effect. He was standing by an old thorn-tree, rather crooked, and dead at the top; the village women were on the green washing their clothes, which glistened in the sunlight, and throwing down chopped eggs and nettles to feed the downy, yellow goslings; a gentleman’s gardener was clipping a hedge, while a herd-boy was summoning his sheep (clipped already for their part) round the thorn-tree, with his cornemuse. It was all so youthful, so pretty, so Italian! The beautiful May had half (or wholly) unclad everything and everyone—the sheep, the geese, the women, the shepherd-minstrel, the hedger, and his hedge....

Why was he thus moved to tenderness in this gladsome and smiling scene? Partly because he had been so happy all day, but chiefly by the shepherd bassoonist calling his flock together with that stage instrument of his beneath the thorn. Firmian had helped a shepherd of this sort, with a crook and a reed-pipe, to drive his own father’s sheep home hundreds of times when he was a boy; and the tones of the Ranz des Vaches brought back in an instant his own rose-coloured childhood—it arose from out its dew of the morning, its bowers of budding blossoms and sleeping flowers, and stood before him in heavenly guise, and smiled in all its own innocence dressed in its thousand hopes, saying, “Behold me! see how lovely I am; we used to play together, you and I; how much I used to give you!—grand kingdoms, broad meadows, and gold, and a great, endless Paradise beyond the hills. But it seems you have nothing left now. And how pale you are, and worn! Come and play with me again!”

Who is there amongst us to whom Music has not brought back his childhood a thousand times? She comes and says, “Are not the rosebuds blown yet which I gave you?” Yes, yes, they are blown; they were white roses, though!

The evening made his joy-flowers close, folding their petals together above their nectaries; and an evening dew of melancholy fell ever heavier and thicker upon his soul as he went on his way. Just before sunset he came to a village; I am sorry to say I cannot remember whether it was Honbart, or Houstein, or Jaxheim; but of this I am pretty certain, that it was one of the three, because it was near the River Jagst, and in Anspach, on the borders of Ellwangen. His night-quarters lay smoking down in the valley before him. Before going on into them he lay down on the hill-side beneath a tree, whose branches were the cathedral chancel of a choir of singing creatures. Not far from him gleamed the trembling tinsel of a piece of water, glittering in the evening sun; and above him the golden leaves and the white blossoms rustled like grasses waving over flowers. The cuckoo (always her own sounding-board and multiplying echo) talked to him from the tree-top in mournful tones of sorrow; the sun was gone; the shadows were throwing thick veils of crape over the brightness of the day. He asked himself, “What is my Lenette doing now? Of whom is she thinking? Who is with her?” And here there fell about his heart, like a band of ice, the thought, “Ah! but I have no loved one whose hand I can clasp!”

After drawing to himself a vivid picture of the tender, delicate, beautiful, woman whom he had so often invoked, but never met—to whom he would have given and sacrificed—oh! so gladly—so much! not only his heart and his life, but his every wish, his every whim—he went down the hill with streaming eyes, which he strove in vain to dry; but, at all events, any kind womanly heart (among the readers of this tale) which has loved in vain, or to its own detriment, will forgive him these burning tears, knowing, from sad personal experience, how the soul seems to journey on through a desolate wilderness, where the deathly Samiel wind blows ceaselessly, while lifeless forms lie scattered around, dashed to earth by the blast, their arms breaking from their crumbling trunks when the living touches them in act to clasp them to his own warm heart. But ye, in whose clasp so many a heart has grown cold, chilled by inconstancy or by the frost of death—ye should not mourn so bitterly as do those lonely souls who have never lost, because they have never found; who yearn for that immortal and eternal love of which even the mortal and transient reflex has never been vouchsafed to bless them.

Firmian carried with him into his night-quarters a tranquil, though a tender, heart, which healed itself in dreams. When he looked up from his slumbers, the constellations, set in his window as in a picture-frame, twinkled lovingly before his bright and happy eyes, and beamed upon him the astrological prophecy of a happy morrow.

He fluttered, with the earliest lark, up out of the furrow of his bed, with as many trills as he, and quite as much energy. That day, fatigue plucking the bird-of-paradise wings from his fancy, he could not quite get out of the territory of Anspach. The day after, he reached Bamberg, leaving on the right hand Nürnberg—that and its Pays Coutumiers and Pays de Droit écrit. His path led him from one paradise to another. The plain seemed to be one great mosaic of gardens; the hills seemed to crouch closer to the earth, as if to let men the more readily climb up upon their backs and humps. The groves of deciduous trees were like garlands, twined and placed to adorn Nature on some great festal day; and the setting sun often glowed through the trellis-work of some leafy balustrade on a hill-side, like a purple apple in some perforated fruit-vase. In one valley one longed to take one’s mid-day sleep; in another, one’s breakfast; in this stream, to see the moon reflected when she stood in the zenith; to see her rise behind this group of trees; to see the sun rise out of that green trellised bed of trees at the Streitberg.

When he arrived the next day at Streitberg, where all those delights could be indulged in at once, he might easily have seen the top of the spire of Bayreuth put on the blushing tints of the evening Aurora—unless he was a much worse walker than his historian; however, he did not care to do so. He said to himself, “I should be an ass were I to go rushing, all dog-tired and dried up as I am, upon the first hour of a delicious reunion and meeting of this sort; neither he (Leibgeber) nor I would get a wink of sleep; and what should we have time to talk about at this hour in the evening? No, no, better wait, and get there the first thing in the morning, about six o’clock, and so have the whole day before us for our millennium.”

Accordingly he passed the night in Fantaisie, an artificial pleasure, rose, and flower-valley, half a mile from Bayreuth. I find it a very hard and difficult matter to reserve the erection of my paper model of this Seifersdorf miniature valley (which I should so much like to introduce at this point), until I find a roomier place for it than the present; however, I can’t help it, and should I not find such a place, there is sure to be ample space in the blank pages at the end of the book.

Firmian started, then, in company with a body of bats and beetles—the advanced guard of a beautiful bright day—and bringing up the rear (so to speak) of the people of Bayreuth, who had just finished their Sunday and Feast of the Ascension (it was the 7th of May): and he walked so late that the moon, in her first quarter, was casting deep, strong shadows of the blossoms and branches upon the greensward. Thus late in the evening, then, Firmian climbed a height from whence he could look down, with tears of joy, to Bayreuth—where the beloved brother of his soul was waiting for him and thinking of him—as it lay softly veiled in the bridal night of spring, and broidered over with shining flakes of Luna’s radiance. I can affirm in his name with a “Verily” that he nearly did what I should have done myself; that is to say, I, with a heart welling up in such a warm sort of manner as his was, and on a night all so adorned and pranked out with gold and silver, should have made but one bound into the Sun Hotel, and into my Leibgeber’s arms. However, he went back again into his odour-breathing Capua (Fantaisie), and there, in the brief intervening space of time between his return and supper and evening prayer time, he met—beside a dried-up water-basin or fish-pond, peopled by a race of deities transformed into stone—he met with nothing less than an exceedingly charming adventure. I proceed to give an account of it.

Beside the wall which surrounded the little lake in question, there was a lady standing; she was dressed all in black except her veil, which was white; she had a bouquet of faded flowers in her hand, and was turning it over with her fingers. She was looking towards the west, that is to say, away from him, and seemed to be contemplating partly the confused mass of stone Suisseries, and the coral-reef of sea-horses, tritons, and so on, and partly a temple, in artificial ruins, which was close by. As he passed slowly on he saw, by a side glance, that she threw a flower, not so much at as over him, as if this sign of exclamation were meant to rouse a pre-occupied person from his reverie. He looked round a little, just to show that he was really awake and observant, and went up to the glass-door of the artificially-ruined temple, in order to linger a little longer in the vicinity of this enigma. Inside the temple, facing him, there was a mirrored pillar, which reflected all the foreground and middle distance (including the fair unknown) in the green perspective of a long background. Firmian saw, in the mirror, the lady throw her bouquet at him bodily, and then roll an orange (which would not fly so far as the flowers) towards his feet. He turned round with a smile. A soft voice cried in an eager, hasty way, “Don’t you know me?” He said, “No;” and ere he had added, more slowly, “I am a stranger,” the unknown Lady Abbess had drawn near to him, and lifted the Moses veil rapidly from her face, and asked, in a louder tone, “Don’t you, now?” And a female head which might have been sawn from the shoulders of the Vatican Apollo (only softened by some eight or ten feminine traits, and a narrower brow) glowed upon him like some bust illumined by the flare of a torch. But, on his repeating that he was a stranger, and when she examined him more closely, and without her veil, and let her gauze portcullis down again (which movements took altogether about as long as one beat of the pendulum of an astronomical clock), she turned away saying, “I beg your pardon,” in a tone which expressed more womanly annoyance than embarrassment.

A very little thing would have set him off to follow her in a mechanical sort of manner. He immediately set about adorning all Fantaisie with plaster-casts of her head (instead of the stone goddesses)—of her head, which had but three pleonasms in the face of it—too much colour in the cheeks, too much curve in the nose, and too much wild fire (or rather material for kindling it) in the eyes. “That is the sort of head,” he thought, “which would be well in its place in an opera-box, beside the sparkling one of some royal bride (ay, and hold its own there), and might contain all the wisdom it might deprive—other people of.”

One carries a magic adventure such as this into one’s dreams with one, for it is like a dream itself. The month of May now stuck in little flower-sticks to all Firmian’s drooping, trembling, joy-flowers (as she had done to Nature’s), and lightly bound them to them. Ah! with what brightness do even little joys beam upon the soul when it stands on some spot all darkened by clouds of sorrow—as stars shine out in the empty sky when we look up at it from a cellar or deep well.

On the exquisite morning which followed, the earth rose with the sun. Siebenkæs had his friend of all time in his head and heart more than the unknown of yesterday; although, at the same time, he took care that his path should lead him by the ocean, and the shell out of which that Venus had arisen—for mere curiosity’s sake—which led to no result. And so he waded away through the moist radiance and cloudy vapour of the glittering silver-mine, tearing down in his passage the gossamer-wreaths all behung with seed-pearls of dew which hung upon the flowers; brushing (in his eagerness to reach his Olympus of yesterday) the chilled butterflies and dew-drops from off the branches, all a-flutter with the insect swarms (the key-board of a harmonica framed in flowers). He climbed to his place in the great “Auditorium” all delight at length. Bayreuth lay behind a glowing drop-curtain of mist. The sun (in his character of “king” of this drama) stood on a hill-top, and looked down at this many-tinted curtain, which took fire and blazed, while the morning breezes caught and bore away its fluttering, sparkling, tinder fragments, and scattered them over the gardens and the flowers. And soon nothing save the sun was shining; nothing round him now except the sky. Amid this radiance Siebenkæs made his entry into his dear friend’s camp of recreation and head-quarter city, whereof all the buildings looked as if they were a glittering, solider sort of air-and-magic castles fallen down from the æther. It was strange, but, on noticing certain window-curtains drawn in (which the street breeze had been toying with), he could scarcely help feeling certain that it was the “Unknown” of yesterday who was doing it, although at that time of the morning (it was barely eight o’clock) a Bayreuth lady would have as little got through her flower-sleep as the red mouse-ear, or the Alpine hawksbeard.[^[62]] His heart beat quicker at every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he attained his perihelion—that is to say—reached the Sun (Hotel), where was the metallic sun which had attracted to it his comet, as the astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of Leibgeber’s room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was still upstairs. Fortunately there just then came in from the street an individual who testified to the correctness of the latter hypothesis, and wagged his tail at sight of Siebenkæs—Leibgeber’s dog to wit.

To storm up the stairs, to burst open the door of joy, to fall upon the beloved breast, was the work of a single instant; and then the barren minutes of life passed unseen and unheard by the close, silent union of two human creatures, who lay clinging together on the waters of life, like two shipwrecked brothers floating, embracing and embraced, on the chill waves, with nothing left them save the heart they die upon....

As yet they had not said a word to one another. Firmian, whom a longer continuance of troubles had made the weaker of the two, wept without disguise at sight of the face of his newly recovered friend. Heinrich’s features were drawn as if by pain. They both had their hats still on. Leibgeber, in his embarrassment, could think of nothing to hold on to except the bell-rope. The waiter came running in. “Oh! it’s nothing!” said Leibgeber; “except, by the way, that I shan’t go out now. Heaven grant,” he added, “that we may get fairly into the thick of a long talk! Drag me into one, brother!”

He had no difficulty in beginning one with the pragmatic detailing of the Nouvelle du Jour—or rather de la Nuit—in short, the town (or, more properly speaking, the country) news of what had taken place on the previous day in the vicinity of the veil of the beautiful Je ne sais quoi.

“I know her” (Leibgeber answered), “as I know my own pulse; but I don’t intend to say anything whatever about her just now. I should be obliged to sit still and wait here for such a time. Put the whole thing off till we are sitting in Abraham’s warm bosom in the Hermitage, which is the second heaven of Bayreuth, next to Fantaisie,—for Fantaisie is the first heaven, and the whole country is the third.”

They then made an ascent into heaven in every fresh street they came to, and also in every subject of conversation which they fell upon. “You shall knock my head off its stalk like a poppy,” said Leibgeber, on Firmian’s betraying (I regret to say) as great a curiosity as the reader’s own to know the secret, “before I transform my mysteries into yours, either to-day, or to-morrow, or the day after that. Thus much I will tell you, that your ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (your ‘Evening Journal’ contains matter more morbific) are perfectly divine, and very heavenly indeed, and not at all bad, and by no means without beauties; but, on the whole (let us say), passable enough.” Leibgeber then told him how delighted he was with the work, and how it surprised him that he, a lawyer in a little country town, with nobody in it but a parcel of shopkeepers and juristic souls, with a sprinkling of higher officialities, should have managed to rise in these satires to such a freedom and purity of art; and, indeed, when I first read the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ I said, myself now and then, “I am sure I couldn’t have written anything of the kind in Hof in Voigtland, and I have written one or two pretty good things there, too.”

Leibgeber placed a crown on the top of the laurel wreath by declaring that it was much easier for him to laugh at the world aloud, and with both lips, than under his breath and with the pen, and this in accordance with well-tried rules of art. Siebenkæs was beyond himself with delight at his friend’s praise. But let no one grudge a pleasure of this sort to our advocate, or to any other worker who, in solitude, and without a single soul to give him a word of praise, has gone steadfastly forward along the path of art which he has honestly chosen, unsupported, unassisted by the smallest encouragement of any kind, whom, at last, on reaching the goal, the fragrance of a leaf or two of laurel from a friend’s hand, penetrates, strengthens, and recompenses, with an aroma as of Araby the Blest. If even the far-famed and the self-satisfied stand in need of a little of the warmth which is derived from other people’s opinions, how much more the diffident and the unknown! Ah! lucky Firmian! to what a distance in the far south-south-west did the passing thunder-storms of thy life now go drifting away. When the sun fell upon them, nothing of them was to be seen but a gentle fall of rain.

At the table d’hôte he observed with delight, in the case of Leibgeber, how wonderfully a constant intercourse with men and cities loosens the tongue though, at the same time, the heart puts on the bridle which has been taken from the lips. Leibgeber thought nothing of talking about himself, and this in the most humorous manner, before all sorts of grand councillors of state and chancery officials dining at the Sun—a thing which he, a cabined, cribbed, confined parish advocate would scarce have dared even after a good bottle of wine. As the discourse which he delivered on this occasion pleased the parish advocate, I shall build it into this history, and place over it the superscription—