TWENTY-SIXTH, OR XXI TRINITATIS, SECTION.
Diner at the Schoolmaster's.
When an author is left so many weeks behind his story as I am, he says to himself, the deuce may take and carry off to-day's Post-Trinitatis if he will. I will therefore speak of nothing in this section but of to-day's Post-Trinitatis, of my sister, my keeping-room and myself. Few storytellers will have had to-day behind their ink-stands so good a day as their colleague.
I sit here in Schoolmaster Wutz's upper chamber and have for the last quarter of a year been holding my arm out of the window as a branch candlestick with a long light, to shine into the ten German circles. I shall, every fall and winter, begin to make all my sections as I do to-day's by candle-light at 4½ o'clock in the morning; for as the sublime darkness before midnight lifts man away above the earth and its clouds, so does that which follows midnight lay us back again in our earthly nest--after 12 o'clock at night I begin already to feel a new joy of life, which increases just in proportion as the morning light streaming down thins the darkness and makes its transparent. Precisely the finest and most invisible feelers of our soul run on like roots under the coarse world of sense and are repelled by the most distant agitation. E. g. if the sky is rayless and cloudless toward the east, and toward the west darkened with heavy clouds, I then just in joke turn round and round more than ten times--when I stand facing the east all inner clouds flee away out of my spirit--if I turn toward the west, they hang down again round about it--and in this way by rapid revolutions I compel the most opposite sensations to approach and recede before me.
In this pleasure-section logical order is not even to be thought of; historical order is alone to be found; only there is many a thought with a thousand brilliant angles that will be suppressed by my snuffers when I trim the candle, or drowned in my cup, when I drink out of it yesterday's coffee. This latter is rather to be recommended to the public; among all warm drinks cold coffee is, indeed, of the most detestable flavor, but at the same time of the least potency. The sleeping day like a sleeping beauty, aglow with her morning dreams, is already red, and must soon open its eye. Its first business will be--poetically speaking--to wake up my sister and come with her as a bedfellow into my chamber. I ought like a Moravian Brother to have two or three thousand sisters, I so love them all. Verily, many a time, I feel like striking out with a Satyr's rude goat-feet against the good female sex, and then let it be, because I see beside me the little Sunday shoes of my Philippina and my fancy shoves into them the small, womanly feet, that will have to step into so many a thorn-tangle and rain-puddle, both of which easily penetrate the thin tapestry of the female foot. The empty clothes of a person, particularly of children, inspire me with kindliness and pity, because they remind me of the suffering which the poor occupant must already have undergone in them; and once in Carlsbad I could easily have reconciled myself to a Bohemian damsel, if she would have allowed me to behold her house-dress, when she was not in it herself....
These periods represent periods of time that have rolled away. Now the blind are healed, the lame walk, the deaf hear--that is to say, all are awake; under my feet the schoolmaster is already cracking up the Sunday sugar; my sister has already laughed at me four times in succession; the senior parson, Setzmann, has already from his window whistled to my landlord the most necessary religious edicts for the day; the clock, like Hezekiah's sun-dial, has, by the miraculous power of the decreeing whistle, gone back an hour, and I can write so much longer; but have thereby withdrawn my pencil from my morning sketch. The sun shines over against my face, and makes my biographical paper a blank Moses'-visage; it is therefore my good fortune that I can take a penknife and Austria and Bohemia or the Germany of the Jesuits, namely, Hamann's maps of the same, and with the knife nail and impale these countries over my window; such a country always keeps off the morning-sun as well and throws as much shadow over it, as if I had the shame-apron or pallium of a window curtain hanging there.
My pen now runs on, in the earth-shadow of the orb, thus: Wutz keeps not in his house three respectable chairs, no window curtains or tapestry-hangings. Meanwhile very much too showy furniture lies in Scheerau; I enjoy here the most miserable, and say to myself, a Prince can hardly show a worse in an artificial hermitage. Even our almanac we, I and my landlord, write out for ourselves with our own hands, like fellows of the Berlin Academy--only with chalk on the keeping room door; every week we publish a Heft or weekly part of our almanac and wipe out the past. On the four-square stove three couples might dance, whom, like the modern tragedies, notwithstanding all deformity of arrangement and breadth, it would poorly warm through. It must, by the way, come at last to hand and pocket stoves when the times arrive that we shall have to fetch out of the mines instead of the metals the wood wherewith we now feed them....
A ram was terribly pounded, that is, his red shank--the tin platters, the baptismal presents of the little Wutzes, are dusted out--my silver knife and fork are borrowed for the occasion--the fire crackles--the Frau Wutz runs--her children and birds scream.--All these preparations for a far too great diner, which is to-day to be given down below, I hear up in my study-chamber. Such preparations are perhaps more suitable to the rank of the two guests who are to receive the entertainment, than to the station of the two school-men who give it. To the present historian and his sister, namely, they are permitted to give a dinner and to sit themselves with the company at the table. The schoolmaster had been allowed to install much of his cleaned-out furniture for the space of a week in my sitting-room, because his own was at last, after long petitioning--for the consistory does not look with favor on repairs in the visible any more than in the invisible church--being reformed, i. e., repaired, namely whitewashed.--Therefore he invited me (in court style) to dine, and I (in similar court style) accepted the invitation.
I shall not write out the rest of the section till evening, partly in order not to think away my appetite for dinner, partly by way of hobbling after a little addition to it in the open air, where, besides, I can hear two or three yellow-hammers and the church-people sing. On the whole the after-summer, which, to-day, with its finest sky-blue dress and the sun upon it as order-badge, stands out there upon the fields, is a still Good Friday of Nature; and if we human beings were polite people, we should go out oftener into the open air and politely escort the departing summer to the very door. I foresee I should never be able to look my fill at the mild sun, which has become a moon stealing softly around us, and which in the after-summer deserves the feminine article [die Sonne], if I were not obliged to fix my eye upon the heights of Scheerau, where my good souls live and whence my Doctor is coming to-day to visit me....
Gone down below the earth is now the day and its sun. A happy journey home, beloved friend! On the silver-ground with which the moon overlays thy way, may thy soul paint the lost Eden of youth, and the black shadow which thou and thy shy steed cast upon the radiant floor must glide behind you, not before!
Why are most of the population of this book precisely Fenk's friends? For two substantial reasons. In the first place the quicksilver of humor which shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his heart, amalgamates the most easily with all characters. Secondly, he is a moral optimist. I would give ten metaphysical optimists for one moral one, who knows how to enjoy, not a single plant as the caterpillar does, but like man, a whole flora of pleasures--who has not five senses only, but a thousand for everything, for women and heroes, for fields of knowledge and pleasure parties, for tragedies and comedies, for Nature and for courts.--There is a certain higher tolerance, which is not the fruit of the Peace of Westphalia, nor of the Concord of 1705, but of a life filtered through many years and improvements--this tolerance finds in every opinion the element of the True, in every species of beauty the Beautiful, in every humor the Comic, and does not regard, in men, nations and books, difference and peculiarity of merit as the absence of it. Not merely with the best must we be pleased, but with the good and everything.
When the people had come back from the little church and I from the great one, the dining in the Wutz house began. Our landlord received the pair of guests with his usual, and with an unusual friendliness beside; for he had brought home with him to-day from his church-collection--by creeping into all the pews after divine service and attracting to himself magnetically all the pennies which had fallen during the collecting--a considerable silver fleet of 18 pence. The splendor of the banquet did not in this room crush out the enjoyment. Knives and forks, as already mentioned, were of silver and from me; but who could help taking pleasure in performing therewith at a table where the meats and sauce are dished out of one--pan?--our show-dishes were perhaps too sumptuous for an elector; for they consisted not of porcelain, wax or alabaster seeds on plate-glass dishes, nor did they weigh a few pounds merely: but the two show-dishes weighed sixty, and were from the same master and of the same material as the electoral bench, of flesh and blood, namely, Wutz's children. An ecclesiastical elector would not have been able for pleasure to eat a morsel, if like us, he had had standing beside his giant-table a dwarf-table with its little ones around it. Their table was not much larger than a herring-dish; but they had an eye to proportion and feasted from the Lilliputian table-service of which since Christmas they had made more of a sportive than serious use. The little ones were beside themselves, at cutting up their meat on wafers of plates and with hair-saws of knives; play and earnest, here as with feasting actors, melted into each other; and I saw in the end that it was so with me too, and that my enjoyment arose from artificial littleness and poverty.
At the great table--with other tables the reverse holds--the individual conversation soon passed over into general; I and the Cantor said every moment "the Prussian," "the Russian," "the Turk," meaning (like the Prime Minister) by the nation in each case its Regent. I took to-day such a peculiar pleasure in miserable customs, that I let every morsel be preached into me and drank over twenty healths. Ladies of rank cannot let themselves down to unfrizzled people so easily as men can, at least to those of the female sex; but my sister deserves that her brother should bestow upon her in his book the praise of the handsomest and most amiable condescension. The more womanly a lady is, so much the more disinterested and good-natured is she; and those maidens, especially, who love half the human race, love the whole heartily, e. g., in regard to the Resident Lady von Bouse, one knows not whether she bestows more on the poor or on the men. Old maids are stingy and hard. My doctor and a bottle of wine came in as dessert. As he reads in the present book every week, I prefer to scold rather than praise him in it. The best I can do is to weave in here an ambiguous thing, which with many will amount neither to praising nor blaming him--his hearty inclination toward the female sex, which stands midway between indifferent gallantry and ardent love. This same inclination suits our sex very well, but not the female, to which, however, my sister belongs. The affair grew simply out of her left ear. The ear-ring had torn its way through the ear-flap; she ought, however, properly to have waited till Monday, when her brother would have bored her ear for her, like that of a Jewish slave, in the most skillful manner. But it must be done to-day and his doctor's hat was the cover of her design. It should have made the subject of a picture, how the poor Pestilentiary rubbed and polished the ear-flap between his three front fingers--like a medical leaf which one is to smell of--in order to make it swollen and insensible.
Nothing is more perilous to me and the medical counsellor, than to pick and stroke at a lady with two or three fingers--to stretch the whole arm around her is, for us, attended with no danger whatever; just as nettles burn far more when lightly touched than when grasped vigorously. Perhaps it is with this fire as with the electric fluid, which passes into man in a larger stream through the tips of the fingers than through a broad surface. My sister went further and brought an apple; the Doctor had to press with his pulse-fingers the red ear-tip against the apple, and then force an egrette, or whatever it was, through this organ of sense, which maidens prick up much seldomer than they pucker-up the one nearest to it--and now could be buckled or buttoned in what belonged there. The steel almost chained the operator himself to her ear. "There is nothing with which a beauty attaches one to her more effectually, than by giving one occasion to do her a favor," the Doctor himself said and learned it by his own experience. Hence the operator and ear-magnetizer complained it was hard to cure a beauty without loving her, and that his first fair patient had almost made a patient of him. I have nothing against the Doctor; let him be a cosmopolite in love if he will--but, Sister, I would thou wert already in bed, because any minute in which I merely take two or three steps up and down, I am not sure that thou wilt not be squinting into my chapters and reading what I blame in thee. Ah, I blame less than I pity thy fancy, that plays so airily around thy own and others' troubles, and thy heart so spun out of the tenderest fibres, that the white crown of shy womanliness, which alone adorns and exalts all these traits, has, in the crowded apartments of the Lady Resident become slightly tarnished with black, like silver in marshy Holland, and that thy virtue, which essentially wants nothing, wants the form of virtue! Ye parents! your young men can hardly make themselves black in hell; but for your daughters and their snow-white raiment Heaven itself is scarcely clean enough!
They are seldom worse than their company, but also seldom better. This spiritual wine absorbs the flavor of the Apples-of-Eve and of-Paris which lie about it; after that it still tastes good, only not like wine.
The Doctor gave me much light on Gustavus's condition, which at a proper time shall in turn be given to the reader.
A certain person, who almost every fortnight reads over what I have written, is satirical, and asks me whether on page Aaa Zzz the further courting between Paul and Beata will be worked out--he further asks, whether it has been already related to the reader, that the coquetting Paul has since that made verses, profiles, bouquets and adagios, in order to bring on and present his heart in these dessert dishes, these pierced fruit-dishes, these confect-baskets--this enfant terrible of a mocking personage asks finally whether it has been already reported to the world that Beata, however, cared for nothing of it all but the empty basket[[67]] and the empty dessert dish.... At bottom this malice never offends me; but Doctor Fenk and the reader have manifestly the wickedest ingenuity in placing and seeing heart-matters in a false light. Verily, it has heretofore been mere joke, my alleged love; and if it were not, it must needs become such, because such a handsome and meritorious rival as I, it seems, am to meet in Gustavus, I could not find it in my heart to outstrip and overshadow, even if I had the power or the liberty, which to be sure is not the case.