The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,—he and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of her parents;—but here in the country, where there are fewer moral weeds than in cities (just as there are fewer botanical in fields than in gardens), and where one enjoys pleasures without maîtres de déplaisirs,—here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing for all other love,—no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be. Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English ones had upright heads and the Belgian hanging ones.
All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended them,—or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,—or what the reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[[34]] which were the names of the three holy kings from the East.
The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious, condensed style,—he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself, that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds of motive in the will, still man chooses as well his system as his conduct.
Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this: Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to) that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too, that the poets could sing for Liberty, indeed, but not speak for it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I know men are now neither barbaric nor cultivated enough to enjoy the Poets and follow them; Poets, Religion, Passions, and Women are four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the middle age,—that of despising them; the past age was that of deifying them; the future will be that of honoring them." The indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something higher than property or life;—when he further said, every man of culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government, notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in democracies enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;—and when he made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for the English people, armor-bearer and Contradictor, because the principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution; because all acts of injustice were committed according to the show of law, which was better than a justice against the show of law; and because the nunnery-grating which had now been built around the freedom of the English press[[35]] was no worse than the Athenian prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,—
The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....
Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said: "If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and every hearer would still cry, Hear him!" Victor said, with the modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from these principles that he resembled them;—perhaps at the next club!" "And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a few weeks."—If we live to see it,—I and the reader,—it is to be hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the company.
My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages; but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with passionate embrace forever to their souls.
After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,—this time it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero qui jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynée ou perdue,[[36]]—or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he. Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound carp,—a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the adopted son Bastian,—not so much whether it was properly scaled (he passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[[37]] is after all of small consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.—His own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake, more considerately, Appel! Embitter not my first Easter-day," said he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.
However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four pounds—so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted—weighs more in the fish-scales of contentment, than the golden fish-bones in the red field of the arms of Count Windischgrätz!
Could he then stay long in the kitchen,—that widow's seat of his old departed youth,—among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,—although he had to-day in the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[[38]] at least as a bandage over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose before so many thick-skinned souls—who in their empty breasts approve the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows—how often he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of lead, were I not obliged to for the reason—