My tenants and vassals, after filching from me so much of my six non-natural things, gave me back in the very act half of the first, namely, wakefulness; but they had worked themselves into such a sweat on my account, that I was thrown into one on theirs. When I woke up, I thought at first I had been dreaming; but upon becoming more wide awake I observed that, with the exception of names, it was the stolen history of my own neighborhood. To be sure it vexes me just as much as if the illuminations and the musical uproar had been arranged expressly on my account, that the subjects make both merely with the malicious intention of driving their great or little Regent from disgust and torture to betake himself to his tour again; which they have evidently learned from the Oriental caravans, which, in like manner, by drumming and lighting fires keep off wild beasts from their bodies.
THIRD SECTION.
Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles
Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check was Gustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.
Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.
Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial, i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the Moravian Diminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.
But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[[10]] and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.
Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profound earthly life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers, whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with admiration.
The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.
After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.