The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings

by Jean Paul

I have just risen from a singular dream; but the foregoing Box makes it natural. I dreamed that all was verdant, all full of odors; and I was looking up at a steeple-ball glittering in the sun, from my station in the window of a little white garden-house, my eyelids full of flower-pollen, my shoulders full of thin cherry-blossoms, and my ears full of humming from the neighboring beehives. Then, methought, advancing slowly through the beds, came the Hukelum Parson, and stept into the garden-house, and solemnly said to me: "Honored Sir, my wife has just brought me a little boy; and I make bold to solicit your Honor to do the holy office for the same, when it shall be received into the bosom of the church."

I naturally started up, and there was--Parson Fixlein standing bodily at my bedside, and requesting me to be godfather; for Thiennette had given him a son last night about one o'clock. The confinement had been as light and happy as could be conceived; for this reason, that the father had, some months before, been careful to provide one of those Klappersteins, as we call them, which are found in the aerie of the eagle, and therewith to alleviate the travail; for this stone performs, in its way, all the service which the bonnet of that old Minorite monk in Naples, of whom Gorani informs us, could accomplish for people in such circumstances, who put it on....

--I might vex the reader still longer; but I willingly give up, and show him how the matter stood.

Such a May as the present (of 1794) Nature has not, in the memory of man--begun; for this is but the fifteenth of it. People of reflection have for centuries been vexed once every year, that our German singers should indite May-songs, since several other months deserve such a poetical night-music much better; and I myself have often gone so far as to adopt the idiom of our market-women, and instead of May butter, to say June butter, as also June, March, April songs.--But thou, kind May of this year, thou deservest to thyself all the songs which were ever made on thy rude namesakes!--By Heaven! when I now issue from the wavering, checkered acacia-grove of the Castle-garden, in which I am writing this Chapter, and come forth into the broad, living day, and look up to the warming Heaven, and over its Earth budding out beneath it,--the Spring rises before me like a vast full cloud, with a splendor of blue and green. I see the Sun standing amid roses in the western sky, into which he has thrown his ray-brush, wherewith he has to-day been painting the Earth;--and when I look round a little in our picture-exhibition, his enamelling is still hot on the mountains; on the moist chalk of the moist Earth, the flowers full of sap-colors are laid out to dry, and the forget-me-not with miniature colors; under the varnish of the streams, the skyey Painter has pencilled his own eye; and the clouds, like a decoration-painter, he has touched off with wild outlines and single tints; and so he stands at the border of the Earth, and looks back upon his stately Spring, whose robe-folds are valleys, whose breast-bouquet is gardens, and whose blush is a vernal evening, and who, when she arises, shall be--Summer.

But to proceed! Every spring--and especially in such a spring--I imitate on foot our birds of passage; and travel off the hypochondriacal sediment of winter; but I do not think I should have seen even the steeple-ball of Hukelum, which is to be set up one of these days, to say nothing of the Parson's family, had not I happened to be visiting the Flachsenfingen Superintendent and Consistorialrath. From him I got acquainted with Fixlein's history,--every Candidatus must deliver an account of his life to the Consistorium,--and with his still madder petition for a steeple-ball. I observed, with pleasure, how gayly the cob was diving and swashing about in his duck-pool and milk-bath of life; and forthwith determined on a journey to his shore. It is singular, that is to say, manlike, that when we have for years kept prizing and describing some original person or original book, yet the moment we see such, they anger us; we would have them fit us and delight us in all points, as if any originality could do this but our own.

It was Saturday, the third of May, when I, with the Superintendent, the Senior Capituli, and some temporal Raths, mounted and rolled off, and in two carriages were driven to the Parson's door. The matter was, he was not yet--invested, and to-morrow this was to be done. I little thought, while we whirled by the white espalier of the Castle-garden, that there I was to write another book.

I still see the Parson, in his peruke-minever and head-case, come springing to the coach-door and lead us out; so smiling--so courteous--so vain of the disloaded freight, and so attentive to it. He looked as if in the journey of life he had never once put on the travelling-gauze of Sorrow; Thiennette again seemed never to have thrown hers back. How neat was everything in the house, how dainty, decorated, and polished! And yet so quiet, without the cursed alarm-ringing of servants' bells, and without the bass-drum tumult of stair-pedalling. Whilst the gentlemen, my road-companions, were sitting in state in the upper room, I flitted, as my way is, like a smell over the whole house, and my path led me through the sitting-room over the kitchen, and at last into the churchyard beside the house. Good Saturday! I will paint thy hours as I may, with the black asphaltos of ink, on the tablets of other souls! In the sitting-room, I lifted from the desk a volume gilt on the back and edges, and bearing this title: "Holy Sayings, by Fixlein. First Collection." And as I looked to see where it had been printed, the Holy Collection turned out to be in writing. I handled the quills, and dipped into the negro-black of the ink, and I found that all was right and good. With your fluttering gentlemen of letters, who hold only a department of the foreign, and none of the home affairs nothing (except some other things about them) can be worse than their ink and pens. I also found a little copperplate, to which I shall in due time return.

In the kitchen, a place not more essential for the writing of an English novel than for the acting of a German one, I could plant myself beside Thiennette, and help her to blow the fire, and look at once into her face and her burning coals. Though she was in wedlock, a state in which white roses on the cheeks are changed for red ones, and young women are similar to a similitude given in my Note;[^[60]]--and although the blazing wood threw a false rouge over her, I guessed how pale she must have been; and my sympathy in her paleness rose still higher at the thought of the burden which Fate had now not so much taken from her, as laid in her arms and nearer to her heart. In truth, a man must never have reflected on the Creation-moment, when the Universe first rose from the bosom of an Eternity, if he does not view with philosophic reverence a woman, whose thread of life a secret, all-wondrous Hand is spinning to a second thread, and who veils within her the transition from Nothingness to Existence, from Eternity to time;--but still less can a man have any heart of flesh, if his soul, in presence of a woman, who, to an unknown, unseen being, is sacrificing more than we will sacrifice when it is seen and known, namely, her nights, her joys, often her life, does not bow lower, and with deeper emotion, than in presence of a whole nun-orchestra on their Sahara-desert;--and worse than either is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.

"It is little serviceable to thee, poor Thiennette," thought I, "that now, when thy bitter cup of sickness is made to run over, thou must have loud festivities come crowding round thee." I meant the Investiture and the Ball-raising. My rank, the diploma of which the reader will find stitched in with the Dog-post-days, and which had formerly been hers, brought about my ears a host of repelling, embarrassed, wavering titles of address from her; which people, to whom they have once belonged, are at all times apt to parade before superiors or inferiors, and which it now cost me no little trouble to disperse. Through the whole Saturday and Sunday I could never get into the right track either with her or him, till the other guests were gone. As for the mother, she acted, like obscure ideas, powerfully and constantly, but out of view; this arose in part from her idolatrous fear of us; and partly also from a slight shade of care (probably springing from the state of her daughter), which had spread over her like a little cloud.

I cruised about, so long as the moon-crescent glimmered in the sky, over the churchyard; and softened my fantasies, which are at any rate too prone to paint with the brown of crumbling mummies, not only by the red of twilight, but also by reflecting how easily our eyes and our hearts can become reconciled even to the ruins of Death; a reflection which the Schoolmaster, whistling as he arranged the charnel-house for the morrow, and the Parson's maid singing, as she reaped away the grass from the graves, readily enough suggested to me. And why should not this habituation to all forms of Fate in the other world, also, be a gift reserved for us in our nature by the bounty of our great Preserver?--I perused the gravestones; and I think even now that Superstition[^[61]] is right in connecting with the reading of such things a loss of memory; at all events, one does forget a thousand things belonging to this world....