Seven days earlier than the regular time my Gustavus communed; for the Consistory--the Westphalian tribunal[[37]] [or Star Chamber], of the parsons, the Penitentiary of the churches and the counterpoise of the government, sent out to us at the castle with pleasure these seven days which his communion-age wanted of its full weight, tor the same number of guilders, as a spiritual fast-dispensation or remission on account of age, (venia ætatis). My pupil had therefore--while the most competent religious teacher sat idle at home--to march out twice a week to the stupid senior parson Setzmann in Auenthal, who fortunately was no jurist as I was, and in whose parsonage a herd of catechumens were obliged to thrust their noses into the coagulated catechismal milk;--Gustavus instead of the beast's tapering snout brought with him a too short muzzle.
Nevertheless, senior Setzmann was not bad; on a parliamentary wool-sack he might have sat till he became an orator, i. e., a creature who, among the persons who in the beginning do not believe him, persuades himself first of all. An orator is as easy to be persuaded as he is able to persuade. The senior, in the first hour after the sermon each Sunday, was pious enough; he might indeed incur damnation, but it would be merely for want of sermons and of beer. A reasonable intoxication stands instead, to an incredible degree, of both the ascetic and the poetic enthusiasm. The readers are no friends of mine who say it is out of mere envy and chagrin that my Gustavus heard his lectures, if I record and send it out into the world that the cellar was the Parson's church of St. Paul and St. Peter--that his soul, like the flying fish, soared upward only so long as its wings were oiled--that he appeared always intoxicated and tenderly affected at once, and never aspired to enter heaven, until he could no longer see it. Hermes and Oemler say that I should avoid offence--although the example of Setzmann must give a greater than the making fun of it--if I should deliver in Latin, that the aquæ supercelestes of his eyes always accompanied his two-inches-deeper humores peccantes.
Gustavus went out to him on breezy spring-afternoons over the young grass, enjoying on his way the prospect of two charming things. The first was this missionary of the young village heathen himself, whose enthusiastic breath stirred like a tempest Gustavus's ideas, every one of which was a sail, and who, especially in the last and sixth week, when he stretched the young subjects of the six weeks' confinement on the last of the sixth article, so lengthened the ears of my Gustavus that there grew out from them a pair of wings that flew away with his little head. Secondly, his heart was set upon a broad band above a broad neckerchief and a corresponding apron, all of which, moreover, was as blossom-white as he, and adorned the fairest body in the whole parish--namely, that of Regina--who was preparing herself there for the second communion. Such a phenomenon, my Gustavus, quite naturally attracted more than distracted thee; and if the school-government had set over against me only half of such a muse on the seat of instruction in the place of my pot-bellied leaky conrector--Heavens! I should have learned, furthermore memorized, furthermore declined, likewise conjugated, and finally expounded! It was, therefore, secondly, no witchcraft, Gustavus--inasmuch as thine ear only was turned to the windward side of the pastor, but thine eye to the sunny side of Regina--that thou shouldst have made small account of the extra half hour which the senior gave, by way of befooling his conscience. He made, in order to quiet that assessor and judge and summoner in the heart, the conscience, his catechizings half an hour,[[38]] and his sermons three quarters longer than the whole diocese. Man likes to do more than his duty better than to do his duty.
As Gustavus did not know that girls overlook nothing and overhear everything, the whole catechism was to him a love letter, in which he conversed with her. When she had to answer the senior, he grew red; "the senior" (he thought), "cannot answer for his questioning and tormenting," and his optic nerve took root in her face.
As the Falkenbergs had no special communion-chamber with velvet floor, my god-father, the Captain, went at the head of his vassals up round the altar; and, therefore, Gustavus did too.
On the eve of Confession-Sunday--Oh ye tranquil days of my purest raptures, pass by again before me and give me your childish hand, that I may faithfully describe you in all your beauty!--on Saturday, after dinner, Gustavus--who even during the meal had hardly been able to look upon his parents for love and emotion--went up stairs in order, after so beautiful a custom, to beg pardon of his parents for his faults. Man is never so beautiful as when he begs or grants forgiveness. He went up slowly, in order that his eyes might grow dry and his voice steadier; but when he came before the parental eyes, he quite broke down again; he held for a long time in his glowing hand the paternal one, with the intention of saying something, were it only the three words: "Father, forgive me!" but he could not find any voice, and parents and child transformed words into silent embraces.
He came to me also.... in certain moods one is glad that another is in the same, and therefore forgives one.... I would, Gustavus, that I had thee at this moment in my chamber. If children conceive of God--not (as grown up people do), as one like themselves, that is as a child--but as a man: for a child's heart, that is enough. Gustavus, after these confessions, went--reeling, trembling, stupefied, as if he saw, what he thought, namely, God--down into the deserted cavern of his childhood, where below the earth's surface he had been trained up, and where his first days and first plays and wishes lay buried. Here he would fain kneel down, and, in this state of confused devotion, wherein the genius of suns and worlds in that perhaps holiest time of our life beholds all warm hearted children, transform his whole soul into a single sound, a single sigh, and offer it up on the altar of thanksgiving; but this greatest human thought tore itself away like a new soul from his, and overmastered it--Gustavus lay prostrate, and even his thoughts were dumb ... But the voice is heard that remains in the bosom, and the thought is seen that sinks back under the rays of the genius; and in the other world, man gives voice to prayers which were stifled here below....
On the evening of this sacredly blissful day, peace, as a tender nurse,[[39]] bore on her secure hands his overfreighted heart; he did not violently throw his short childish and human arms around the goddess of joy, but she gently folded her maternal arms round him. This zephyr of tranquillity--instead of that hurricane of exultation which hurries man through and against everything--still continued on Whitsuntide to play around his blossoming young life, and his being lay as if wafted on a soft cloud when the radiant Whitsunday sun found him; but when the flower-fragrance of the decorated breast, the feeling and the pressure of the rustling attire, the pealing of the bells whose prolonged vibrations ran like golden threads around all individual scenes and bound them together in one, the odor of the birch trees and the green claro-oscuro of the church, even the fasting--when all this flung his feelings and the globules of his blood into flying circles, then did there stand in his bosom a kindled sun; never did the image and ideal of a virtuous man burn before him in so great cloud-transcending outlines as then!
But the evening! Then did the little communicants stroll round in modest groups with lighter heart and fuller stomach and with a distinct sense of food and finery. Gustavus--of whose flames the supper had smothered some portion, though a soft glow still lingered--roamed slowly up and down his garden, (for his brain was no dancing-place, but a moss-bank of joyous feelings), and tore open the tulip-leaves which had closed in slumber, in order to let loose from their flowery prison many a belated bee. At last, he leaned against the post of the rear garden gate and looked down longingly over the meadows into the village, where the rows of parents were chatting together and with eyes of motherly vanity following their children,--parents who to-day walked out for the first and haply for the last time, because peasants and orientals love best to sit. At that moment there moved cautiously around the garden-wall a shy picket of peasants' children, whose object was to hear more nearly the old starling, which Gustavus had to-day brought in its cage out into open air, and amuse themselves with the racy and saucy words the bird would utter in his tone of genuine irony. Children in strange clothes, and strange places, are strangers to each other; but Gustavus had fortunately his key-note at hand by which to pass over into conversation with them, the starling, and had only to begin one with him. And the plan succeeded; the rhetorical arts of the bird soon made the conversation so general and unembarrassed, that one could talk with every one about everything. Gustavus began to tell stories, but before a younger and fairer public than mine; his stories he invented and related at the same moment, and his fancy's wings hit against nothing in the immeasurable careering-ground. In fact, one invents more ingenious contes in talking than in writing, and Madame D'Aunoy, whom I would rather marry than read, would have given us grown-up children better fairy tales if she had invented them before the ears of the little ones.
Under the pretext of sitting down, he invited and entreated his whole audience and public to come up to a terrace which, with a stairway, was woven and arched around a linden-tree in the garden.... I do not let my readers sit down so quickly; for bees, carvers, and I, love lindens exceedingly, those for the honey, these for the soft wood, and I for the sake of the name and the fragrance.