Oath of Allegiance.--I, Beata, Oefel.
Fourteen days after Fenk's letter ... But are readers to be relied on? I know not how it happens with the German reader, whether from a splinter in the brain, or from an effusion of lymph, or from deadly debilitation, that he forgets every thing a writer has said, or it may come from constipation or from irregular discharges, anyhow the author has to bear the brunt of it. Thus I have already spread the information over a multitude of sheets by compositors and printers for the benefit of the reader (but to no effect), that we have 13,000 thalers in the Prince's hand, which are to come to us; that I have, it is true, never studied the Jura; that I did, nevertheless, while I was undergoing my examination as an advocate, contrive to pick up many a nice juristical crumb, which now stands me well in stead; that Gustavus is to be a cadet, and I am bent upon being a justiciary; that Ottomar is invisible and even inaudible, and that my Principal squanders too much.
Unhappily it cannot be otherwise: for so long as he knows of an apartment or a stable without cubic contents of an animal nature, he hangs out his fishing-rod for guests. Like our modern women, he is never well except in a social hurricane and a thicket of visitors; he and these women come up out of such a living men-and-women-bath as rejuvenated and regenerated as out of an ant-and-snail-bath. He never can flatter himself upon having herein the least resemblance (to say no more) to the Commercial Agent Röper, who in the solitude of a sage and a capitalist silently reflects upon house-mortgages and arrears of interest, and who knows that his castle possesses only cup and pitcher privilege,[[48]] and therefore no one can be entertained over night. Falkenberg, hearken to the biographer! Close now and then thy purse, thy door, and thy heart. Believe me, fate will not spare thy generous soul. Fortune in her race will run over and cut in pieces with her wheel thy soft heart, to empty her loto-wheel behind her bandage before a Röper. O friend! he will take from thee all that thou would'st give to others' misery or thy own enjoyment, not even leaving thee the courage to bury thy shamed heart with its wounds in the bosom of a friend!--and then how will it fare with thy son?
And yet!--I blame thee only beforehand; but afterward, when thou hast one day made thyself miserable by making others happy, then wilt thou find respect in all good eyes and love in every good breast!
... Fourteen days, then, after Fenk's letter, when my pupil was already eighteen years old, but still without the position of cadet, there sat at my principal's lodgings a bureau d'esprit of Bohemian noblemen, with fiery Pentecostal tongues and March beer. I had nothing to drink or to say, but made one of the company. I could never refuse my good captain, but added one, if not to the guests--(one does not begin to prize fully men of a certain too great refinement till one is away from them among men of a certain coarseness)--yet to the people. Many persons are, like him, visiting press-gangs and cannot bid people enough together, yet without knowing why or wherefore, and without any real affection for them. Falkenberg would invite the deaf and dumb. It has its consequences for my readers that I said: "To-day Röper receives the oath of allegiance." Falkenberg, who was fond of speaking ill of others, and doing nothing but good to them, and who would gladly strew peas in the path of his absent hereditary foes, i. e., misers, and yet sweep them away again just as they were about to slip on them, was charmed with my idea and his own. "We must all," said he, "ride over to-day just to vex him (Röper)." In six minutes the drinking bureau d'esprit and the tutor were on their nags; but not Gustavus. He was made for a finer enthusiasm than a noisy one. Hence Gustavus's inner life often involved me with his father (who demanded outward life) in the tedious and useless attempt on my part to convince him wherein the exalted worth of his son properly lay. For a tutor who stands upon his honor, such a thing is too disagreeable.
We saw, as we sat on our horses, Maussenbach, which stood before its noble Boyar,[[49]] and placed the feudal crown on his Italian head. Beside the homage-receiving liege-lord stood his judicial department, his excise college, his privy government, his department of foreign affairs--namely, Herr Kolb, the magistrate, who represented all these colleges in his own person. This miniature ministry of the miniature sovereign stood on a meadow holding a long letter in its hand, from which it read out to the people all that was to be sworn. The hundred hands of the confederation then passed in succession through the two hardening hands of Kolb and Röper, and promised gladly to obey the nobleman, if he, on his part, would promise to command.
But after pleasure comes pain, after hereditary homage a bureau d'esprit.... In the eighteenth century, certainly, many men have been scared, and very much so, e. g., the Jesuits, the aristocrats, also Voltaire and other great authors have often been considerably frightened; but no one in this whole enlightened century was ever so scared as the commercial agent when he saw what was coming; when he saw fifteen human heads and fifteen horses' heads between an artillery train of hands, marching down from above over the hill, who, collectively, had nothing to seek in his palace, but enough to find. But as, in the second place also, no one in the eighteenth century was seldomer at home than he--he, indeed, was so, but crouched down behind plate-glass windows or behind fire-proof wall or gabion, because, like a ring of Gyges, they rendered him invisible--accordingly, he might have found a refuge and withdrawn himself from so many mammalia as many miles off; but out on the meadow it was not to be done. A jolly man, and though he were a miser, will make others jolly: Röper started, shuddered, resigned himself to his fate, and welcomed us more joyfully than we dreamed. He continued in the giving mood to-day, because he was once in the way of giving.
For his vassals who had to-day sworn away their good sense must also drink it away; some two buckets of stuff which tasted as sour as the means by which it had been earned he had released as prisoners from their dungeons on the coronation day--he had had the casks which held the liquor not so much inscribed as whitewashed and certified[[50]] or clarified with double chalk and had had scouring balls of chalky earth let down into them in hammocks so long that at last the beverage was too good to make a present of. The skinflint seeks to save, even while he bestows. For the rest he moved about among his feudal subjects more familiarly and generously than with us ennobled guests;--"this is the way a man always acts, who has no pride of nobility," says the reviewer; "but this is the way the niggard always does," say I, "to whom meaner but silver-veined men are of more account than guests that take what is due to their rank, and who places a servant of his own above an outside friend, and utility above dignity."--Louisa (Mrs. Commercial Agent von Röper), attached to every beer-ark of her husband's a small shallop beside; his gifts were with her always a pretext for making privy supplements thereto. Only she charged the village magistrate to keep a sharp look-out that none of her yeast should be wasted. Nature had given her a free and loving soul; but this very love for her husband left her at least the appearance of his fault.
Thou true heart! let me linger for a few lines upon thy connubial disinterestedness, which counts all thy own virtues as sins and all thy husband's as virtues, and which no praise pleases but that which is given him whom thou surpassest! Why didst thou not fall to the lot of a soul which should imitate and understand and reward thee? Why have there been apportioned to thee for thy sacrifices, for thy heart-rendings here below, no pain-stilling drops but those which fall for thy sake from the fair eyes of thy daughter?
Ah, thou remindest me of all thy sisters in suffering--I know, indeed, full well, from my psychology, ye poor women, that your sufferings are not so great as I imagine them, for the very reason that I imagine and do not feel them, as the lightning, which at the distance of its appearing grows to a fiery snake, is in reality only a spark, which shoots through several moments; but can a man, ye feminine souls, conceive the inward calluses and gashes which his coarse, weapon-hardened finger must produce in your delicate nerves, since he does not deal with you even as you do with him, or as he himself does with the soppy, slimy caterpillars, which he does not venture to take away except with the whole leaf whereon they lie? And then, too, a Louisa and a Beata! But were Jean Paul only your lawyer, as the old man has promised, he would give you solace enough....
But the old man is a poor stick to lean on; does he not creep round through all Lower Scheerau, voting in beforehand all advocates into his judiciary, in order to draw off us counsellors, by the hope of serving under him, from the purpose of serving against him? Meanwhile, however, he must deal honestly with one, and that is myself.
When the Bohemian chivalry and I went from the esplanade into the palace, they and I stumbled upon something very lovely and something very absurd. The absurd was sitting by the lovely. The absurd was called Oefel, the lovely was named Beata. Heaven should give an author a time to paint her and an eternity to love her; Oefel I can have done painting and loving in three seconds. It was an honor to me and to her, that she at once recognized in her old piano-teacher the old acquaintance; but it did not afford me any pleasure that she did not detect in the well-known one a something unknown, and that she did not remember at the sight of me, that she, from a child had become a woman. There is an age when one does indeed forgive the fair, even if they do not notice and do not accept us. Oh, I forgive thee everything, and the greatest proof of it is this, that I speak of it. The young youth admires and desires at once; the older youth is capable of merely admiring. Beata's words and feelings are still the dazzling white and pure fresh snow, just as they have fallen from heaven: no footprint and no step of age have yet smutched this splendor. She was to-day still more beautiful than ever, because she was busier than ever and lent her fair shoulders to her mother's burdens; the pale lunar-aurora which once left the whole heaven upon her cheeks white, now suffused it with a rosy reflection; even the joy of others for which she was to-day active, gave her the heightened color which she usually lost by her own. The maidens know not how very much occupation beautifies them, how much upon them as on doves' necks the plumage plays and sparkles when they move about, and how very much we men resemble beasts of prey, who will not seize any creature that keeps a fixed position.
Her mother joyfully communicated to me the reason why the counsellor or legation was sitting there: he had brought Beata an invitation from the Resident Lady von Bouse to come to her country-seat, where my sister also is. The new palace Marienhof lies half a league from the city; as an annex of the new one Oefel occupies the old, which is perhaps connected with it by secret doors. He impolitely gave it to be surmised that without his fine intriguing--i. e. he made, like the advocates, a bridge instead of a leap over the slenderest brook--the thing would have gone lamely. It is impossible that such a vain fool should stamp a slate-impression of his heart on so precious a stone as Beata. Even though the ninny should in future besiege her every afternoon in the new palace, as he will do, nevertheless I can rely upon what I say--nay I would swear to it. A coxcomb of his magnitude may, to be sure, force one or two angular, mossy, country-damsels (as happened this very day) into an amorous amazement at his bell-polypus gyrations, at his audacity, his sense (i. e., wit) and his immodesty in saying, instead of ladies and the fair sex, merely women: that he can do, and more too, I say; but from Beata's heart all her virtues will eternally separate him; she will, by the side of his love for the minister's lady, not see nor believe his love for her at all; she will open her soul to no sentimental flourishes of an Oefel, which, like counterfeit gold, are now too large and now too small. She will find, rather, there is more chance with an honest Jean Paul; she will, I hope, readily forgive the said Jean Paul the resemblance he may bear in some traits to Oefel, as he is free from the faults of the latter, and stands before her with a true, modest heart, which has hardly the courage softly to breathe upon her the finest gold-leaf of praise, and which, even if misunderstood, is silent, and shrinks back even without having made the attempt. She will, in her decision, steer just as widely away from the old country damsels as I from the young country squires, who sat there in the company. For Oefel's appearance took from them all former wit and sense, and his quicksilvery politeness filled all their limbs with lead; in a falcon-baiting where such a bird pounced upon female hearts, they drew their clumsy wings to their sides and in virtue of their manly sincerity admired, instead of the female charms, his: Jean Paul, on the contrary, remained as he was, and did not let himself be put upon.
I should be leading many a German circle to the presumption of a secret jealousy on my part, if I said nothing at all in praise of Oefel: he promised on the same afternoon to do my pupil a great service. I must premise, that, although he rented the old palace near the resident lady's he did not lodge there, but in the Scheerau cadet-house, wherein he moved from room to room, in order--as his high rank did not allow him to dress singularly--that he might at least act singularly; his object was to study men there, in order to have them engraved on copper. That is to say, he was composing a romance as a short encyclopædia for hereditary princes and crown-tutors, and wrote on the title-page "the Great Sultan." This Fenelon made the harem of his Telemachus into a mirror-chamber, which imaged the whole female court of Scheerau; his work was a herbarium vivum, a flora of all that grows on and around the Scheerau throne, from the prince down--if he still remembers me--to me. When it appears, we shall all swallow it, because in it he has swallowed us all. The reviewers will find nothing in it, but will say: "trivial stuff!" As he never did any thing which he did not before and afterward trumpet to the world, of course even my Captain had heard that he had so long and so finely intrigued with the Cadet-General, that he got leave at last, in the place of an inspecting officer, to occupy and exchange chambers in the cadet schoolhouses; and thus our prince came to the help of this natural historian of men with a human menagerie, just as Alexander did to Aristotle with one of beasts. The Captain, therefore, with his victorious good-heartedness, came to him and begged him cleverly to intercede with the Cadet-General for his Gustavus, that the latter might one day come under his standard. Protector Oefel said the thing was already as good as arranged; he was himself enraptured with the vision of getting a singular genius who had been educated under ground for a room-mate and a sitter.
The refraction of light always shows the land to sea-men some hundreds of miles nearer than it really lies, and by a so innocent illusion fortifies them with hope and pleasure. But in the moral world also the beneficial arrangement exists whereby princes and their ministries keep us prayer-offerers (as Campe would say instead of suppliants) cheerful and lively, in that they, by an ocular illusion, make us see the court-places, offices, favors, which we covet, always some hundred miles or months nearer--(so much nearer, we think we can actually touch them)--than they really are. This illusive appearance of approximation is even then useful as well as usual, when the spiritual or secular bench which is shown in such nearness to the sitters on the long bench of expectancy, proves at last to be nothing in fact but a--bank[[51]] of cloud.
The Commercial Agent (the Captain said to me on the way homeward) is after all not so bad a fellow as you make him out--and the legation-counsellor needs in fact only to grow in years.