"H."
* * * * *
His character and the contents of this dream shut out the suspicion of invention.—For the rest, even if Clotilda refuses his veiled wish to see her in Maienthal, still she must do it with a leaf of paper and three lines, which he can then read a thousand times over, and with which the cabinet of pictures and seals, wherein already are contained the hat and the views, will be considerably enriched. Meanwhile he stood in his fair Alpine valley between two high mountains, on each of which was mustering material for an avalanche,—one is perhaps already started up there in its crushing course, and he is not yet able to see it. The first avalanche, which the least sound of his may topple down upon him, is his crazy relation with his court acquaintance. He can boast of having angered them in a body: the Princess, Joachime, Matthieu. But, even independently of that, some conductor or other—merely because he stands not with the rest on the social isolating stool of the throne—must soon dart a diminished flash at his fingers or his eyes; at boards and at courts no one can stand upright without connections; it is there as in galleys, where all the slaves must move their oars together, if no one is to feel the cutting of the chain. But Victor said to himself, "Be not a child! be not the reversed fox who pronounces sour grapes, because he cannot reach them by leaping, to be sweet! I flatter myself, thou canst dispense with courtly hearts, which like their viands must first be warmed over a chafing-dish full of flickering spirits of wine.—By heaven! a man will surely be able to eat, even though that which he puts on the spit is not fetched by a guard from the kitchen, then handed to a page, then served up by a chamberlain or some other regulation-cavalier.—Only my father,—if it makes no difference to him!" That was just it: in the son there was nothing to be felled, but there was in the father,[[63]] for whom they will probably let the uplifted woodman's and sacrificial axe hover, till he stands under it with his head, which without his return is not to be had.
But deuse a bit does a Pastor-fido care for the first avalanche. On the harmonica-bells of his fancy the external dissonances of fate, as the rolling of carriage-wheels over the pavement does on the strings of a musical instrument, die away in softly ascending murmur. With him, as with the astrologers, April, like my book, was dedicated to the evening-star, i. e. to Venus.
On the contrary, the other avalanche lay already beforehand on his breast,—the possibility of a breach with Clotilda's brother. A jealous man the twelve Apostles and the twelve minor Prophets cannot convert;—if he is cured on Sunday, then on Monday he is sick again, on Tuesday he is raving mad, and on Wednesday you can loose him again; he is weak and cunning and—only lies in wait. The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. This time, furthermore, there was something true at the bottom; and then too the jealous man insures it in good season; jealousy enforces infidelity, and the provoked woman will not, so far as in her lies, leave the man in error. I cannot give myself the trouble (but the reader may) to enumerate in my biography all the little crannies and wood-holes through which he has hitherto let his Flamin see and hear into his love-smitten heart: these knot-holes are so much the larger, as he was before the third Easter-holiday more improvident, for the very reason that he was more innocent, or, rather, more unhappy.
To this add, that Flamin—who every day thought the dear Evangelist Mattheus more honest and open (like a burnt-out touchhole)—every day looked upon his faithful Bastian as more artful and impenetrable. I could wish the Regency-Councillor were more discerning; but crowded souls like Victor's, that have more powers, and for that very reason more sides, than common, seem, of course, to be less porous, just as authors full of meaning seem less clear. A man who exposes to you with frankness all the colors of his heart playing into each other, loses thereby the glory of frankness;—one who like Victor, from humor, collects and shows up other people's tricks, seems to imitate them;—a changeable, an ironical, a fine man is in the eyes of narrow ones a thorough-going false thief. Then, too, Victor, when it could be done without noise, jumped out of the way of any long mentionings of Clotilda, i. e. long dissemblings; and this very flight from artifice, even his present increased human-kindliness toward Flamin, precisely overshadowed his noble form; and nothing consoled him for the distortions of suspicion, but the sweet reflection that to please the brother of his beloved and of his heart he had turned his back upon the fairest days in Maienthal.
[31. DOG-POST DAY.]
Clotilda's Letter.—The Night-Express.—Rents and Gashes in the Band of Friendship.
I was going to have inserted in the Magazine of Literature, that I needed Herrnschmidt's osculologia[[64]] for my (learned) labors,—that is for this Chapter. I wanted to find out from it, how in Herrnschmidt's times they managed with women. In Jean Paul's times, they treat them miserably, that is to say in romances. Only an Englishman can portray excellent women. In the hands of most German romance-founders, the women turn out men, the coquettes w—, the statues lumps, the flower-pieces kitchen-pieces. That the fault lies more with the artists than with the models, not only the models themselves know, but also the Mining-Superintendent, even from the fact, that the female readers of romances are all even more romantic than the heroines of them,—more refined and reserved. The Mining-Superintendent will here—without any design of having eight distinguished women in Mayence bear him to the grave, as they did the women's minstrel and meister-singer, Henry Frauenlob—swear a printed oath (or simply swear in print) that he has found most of his contemporaries better than the good, open, but empty and rough head of the author of the Alcibiades and Nordenschild[[65]] can draw them. In fact, if women did not forgive men everything, even authors, (and in truth they do it seventy times a day, and offer the other cheek, when one has been offended by a kiss,) then no circulating-library keeper could explain how it is that human beings, whose head nevertheless is heavier, whose pineal gland is smaller, and who have six more annular cartilages to the windpipe,—that is, in all, twenty, probably for the sake of their more speaking,—whose breast-bone is shorter, and whose breast-bones are softer than men's,—how such human beings of the female sex can still send their maid or footman to a circulating library with the commission: "A romance of chivalry for my mademoiselle!" My colleagues of the quill—in reference to women I am, according to miners' language, one of the feather,[[66]] not of fire nor of leather—are elected for the education of female readers, as, according to Lessing, the Jews were for the education of the nations, for the simple reason that they are ruder than their pupils.