Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.—Boiling-Point of Friendship.—Splendid Hopes for us.
Who would have thought it of Cicero (if he had not read it) that a man of so many years and so much sense would sit down in his St. John's Island, and manufacture beginnings, introductions, pre-existing germs in advance for the market? However, the man had this advantage, that when he wrote a torso on any subject, he had his choice among the heads lying ready made to his hand, of which he could screw one on to the trunk according to the corpuscular philosophy.—As to myself, who have nothing sedate about me, no one can wonder that I on my Moluccian Frascati[[73]] have reeled and twisted beforehand whole skeins of beginnings. When Spitz afterward brings a Dog-day, I have already commenced it, and have nothing to do but just to clap the historical remnant on to the introduction.—This very beginning itself I have selected for to-day.
At first, however, I had a mind, to be sure, to take this one:—
Nothing torments me about my whole book except my anxiety as to how I shall be translated. This anxiety is not to be blamed in an author, when one sees how the French translate the Germans, and the Germans the Ancients. At bottom it really amounts to one's being expounded by the lower classes and their teachers. I can compare those readers and these classes, in respect of their spiritual fare, which passes first through so many intermediate members, to nothing, except to the poor people in Lapland. When the rich in that country intoxicate themselves in the tippling-room with a liquor which is decocted out of the costly toadstool, the poor people watch around the house-door, till a Lap in easy circumstances comes out and makes—; this translated beverage, the Vulgate of distilled liquor, the poor devils enjoy greatly.
This beginning, however, I am keeping for the Preface to a translation.
It is one of the juggling tricks and lusus naturæ of chance, of which there are very many, that I should begin this Book just in the night of St. Philip's and St. James's day, 1793, when Victor undertook the witch's-journey to the Maienthal Blocksberg, into the midst of the enchanters and enchantresses, and when, in 1792, he arrived from Göttingen.
I cannot say, The reader can easily imagine how Victor lived or grieved through the first May-days; for he hardly can imagine it. Perhaps we all held the bands which bound him to Flamin to be a few thin fibres or unsensitive cords of custom; in fact, however, delicate nerves and firm muscles form the lattice-work[[74]] of their souls. He himself knew not how much he loved him, until he was compelled to cease doing so. Into this common error we all fall, hero, reader, and writer, on the same ground: when one has not been able for a long time to give a friend, whom one has long loved, any proof of that love, for want of opportunity, then one torments one's self with the self-accusation of growing cold towards him. But this accusation is itself the finest proof of love. With Victor yet more things conspired to persuade him that he was becoming a colder friend. The vesper-tilts about Clotilda, those disputations pro loco, did, besides, their part; but he was always afflicting himself with the self-criticism that he had sometimes refused his friend little sacrifices; e. g. the neglecting of a pleasure-party on his account, the staying away from certain too distinguished houses which Flamin hated. But in friendship great sacrifices are easier than small ones,—one would often rather sacrifice to it life than an hour, a piece of property than the gratification of some petty bad habit, just as many people would rather present you a bill of exchange than a piece of blank paper of the same size. The secret is, great sacrifices inspiration makes, but little ones, reason. Flamin, who himself never made little ones, demanded them of others with heat, because he took them for great ones. Victor had less to reproach himself with on this point; but Clotilda shamed him, for her longest and shortest days, as is the case with most of her sex, were nothing but sacrificial days.—Then, too, his natural delicacy, which had now gained by his court-life the addition of the conventional kind, was wounded more deeply than ever by his friend's sharp corners.—The fine people give to their inner man (as to their outer) by bran of almonds and night-gloves soft hands, merely for the sake of feeling better the under side of the cards, and for the sake of giving neat ladylike half-boxes-in-the-ear, but not in order, like the surgeons, to handle wounds with them.
Unfortunately this delusion about his growing cold prescribed to him a friendly external effort to show warmth when with Flamin. Now as the Regency-Councillor did, not consider that even constraint may full as often arise from sincerity, as unconstraint from falseness: accordingly the Devil had more and more his game of Bestia (in which a friendship was the high stake) till on witches' day he actually won it.
But on the 4th of May he is to lose all again, I think. For Victor, whose heart at the least motion bled through the bandage again, undertook not only, on the 4th of May, to be present at the birth-festival of the Court-Chaplain in St. Luna, but also to celebrate a birthday of renewed friendship with Flamin. He would gladly take the first, second, third, tenth step, if his friend would only stop where he was, and not take a step backward. For he cannot forget him, he cannot get over a compulsory renunciation, however easy for him generally the voluntary one was. He pressed every evening Flamin's fair image, which was made out of his love for him, out of his incorruptible honesty, his rock-like courage, his love for the state, his talents, even his excitability, which originated in the double feeling of injustice and of his own innocence,—this glowing image he pressed to his lacerated heart, and when in the morning he saw him going to his public duties, his eyes ran over, and he congratulated the servant who carried his papers behind him. Had not the 4th of May, the great day of reconciliation, been so near with its expiatory offering, he would have been obliged to accustom little Julia to himself, as a third estate between the two others, as a key-note between conflicting tones. Only the hope of May applied to his thoughts, instead of burning stings of nettle-points, at least rose-briers.—The friend of thy youth, dear reader, thy school-friend, is never forgotten, for he has something of the brother about him;—when thou enterest the school-yard of life, which is a Schnepfenthal educational institute, a Berlin scientific school,[[75]] a Breslau Elisabethanum, a Scheerau Marianum,[[76]]—then for the first time thou meetest friends, and your youthful friendship is the morning divine service of life.
Victor was sure beforehand of Flamin's placability; he even saw him very often standing at his window, and glancing across toward the balcony, from which a friendly eye, untroubled by all the misconstructions of the point of honor, looked freely and directly toward the Senior's;—this, however, did not take away his tender yearning, but it was increased by the first returning sight of the face, so fair, so lamented, and so loved. Flamin had a tall, manly form; his compact and receding narrow forehead was the eyrie of spirit; his transparent blue eyes—which his sister Clotilda also had, and which harmonize very well with a fiery soul, as, indeed, the old Germans also and the country people have both—were kindled by a thinking intellect; his compressed, and for that very reason the more darkly red, over-full lips, were settled into the kindly elevation for a kiss; only the nose was not refined enough, but was juristically or Germanly built. The nose of great jurists looks sometimes, in my opinion, as wretchedly as the nose of Justice herself when its flexible material is drawn out and twisted and tweaked under too long fingers. It is not to be explained, by the way, why the faces of great theologians—unless, indeed, they are something else great—have about them somewhat of the typographic magnificence of the Kanstein Bibles. Victor's face, on the contrary, had, less than any other, either these Bursch-like trivial features of many jurists, or the dead-gold of many theologians; his nose—its edge and the indentation of the nasal bridge deducted—descended in Grecian straightness; the angle of the thin, closed lips was (in case he did not happen to be laughing) an acute angle of 1um, and formed with the sharp nose the order-sign and order-cross, which satirical people often wear;—his broad forehead arched itself to a radiant and roomy choir of a spiritual rotunda, wherein a Socratic equally, illuminated soul dwells, though neither this brightness nor that brow consort with inborn wild tenacity, though they do with that which is acquired;—his fancy, that great prize, had, as often happens, no lottery-device on his face;—his eyes, colored like Neapolitan agate, spoke and sought a loving heart; his soft, white face contrasted, like court with war, against Flamin's brown, elastic countenance, which served as the ground for the two glowing cheeks.—For the rest, Flamin's soul was a mirror which flamed under the sun from only a single point; but on Victor's several powers were ground out into flashing facettes. Clotilda had all this tinder-box and these sulphuric mines of temperament in common with her brother; but her reason covered all up. The rushing blood-stream, which with him dashed from rock to rock, glided along with her still and smooth through flowery meadows.