On the morning of the New year, Friedemann, pale and disturbed, was pacing up and down his chamber, when Scherbitz came in.
“The compliments of the season to you!” cried the ever merry page. “Health, contentment, fortune, and all imaginable blessings!”
“The blessing is here!” sighed Friedemann, handing his friend an open letter.
Scherbitz read it through, and said, with some appearance of emotion—“Mon ami! your papa is a dear, charming old gentleman, whose whole heart is full of kindness for his Friedemann; every line of this letter expresses it. May he have a long and happy life! But I pray you, for the thousandth time, to recollect that it is quite impossible to satisfy, honestly, all the claims of such distinguished virtue of the olden time. Believe me, mon ami, the time will come when we, madcaps as we now are, shall be pointed out as wig-blocks that frown upon the disorderly behavior of our juniors. The wheel of time rolls on, and no mortal hand can check its course; it should suffice that we keep ourselves from falling, and being crushed in the dust beneath it.”
“Can we do that?”
“Mon ami! Do I not stand, albeit I am a page forty years old? And look you, I know that I shall remain so, as long as I serve my lord faithfully. I might have opposed the all-powerful minister, and the country would have glorified me; yet I am a page, no captain, at forty years of age! I have been the talk of the capital, yet I stand firm!”
“And your consolation?”
“A knowledge that it has always gone thus in the world; that I am not the first whose life is a failure; that I shall not be the last; a perverse determination to live through a life which a thousand others would end in despair; in fine, curiosity to see what will be the end of the whole matter. Be reasonable, mon ami! I am really something of a hero! Were I an artist, as you are, I should have nobler consolations than perverseness and curiosity. Enough of my own insignificance; but let me ask you, have you forgotten the heroic Händel, whom, three years ago, you welcomed here in the name of your father?”
“How could I forget that noble being?”
“Ah, there I would have you, friend! You tell me yourself, Händel is not, as an artist, like your father; his fantasy is more powerful, his force more fully developed; he soars aloft, a mighty eagle, in the blaze of eternal light; while your father, a regal swan, sails majestically over the blue waters, and sings of the wonders of the deep. Well! we all know Monsieur Händel an honorable man—a man comme il faut; yet how different is he from your father! What the one, in limited circles, with calm and earnest thought, labors after, what he accomplishes in his silent activity—the other reaches amidst the tumult of a stormy life; amid a thousand strifes and victories. Yet your father honors and loves him, and blames him not for the path by which he travels towards the goal. It is also your path, and is not the worst that you might take. So—en avant—mon ami!”