[34] A university beer.
Herr Jerusalem has observed, that the barbarism which often springs up, close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of strengthening mudbath, good for averting the over-refinement, wherewith such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper classes,—for instance with every Patrician's son in Nürnberg, to whom the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,—I believe that such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred and eighty Academic Freedoms,—so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus summed up,[35]—against prescription, and lost none except his moral one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much. This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he had contrived to execute. Let us hear him: His landlord, who was at the same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole community of hens: Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet: in general their main equipments, like Phœnixes, existed but in the singular number; one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was the national uniform of the company; and several other ones, Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related, perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one of this famishing coro invented means of appropriating the Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves, as the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow Nature, continued he,—"fictio sequitur naturam,"—it behoved them to lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his fishing-tackle, anglerwise, down into the court. In a few seconds the barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen now communicating with its feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed not to be awaiting her: for the updrawn fowls were now denominated Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with taking Rutcher-dues, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the original quit-rent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects, like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the happiness, while reading his lecture,—he was just come to the subject of Forest Salt and Coin Regalities,—to descry, through the window of his auditorium, a quit-rent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle air: he followed the incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and animal-magnetiser, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
[35] From Peter I will copy one or two of these privileges; the whole of which were once, at the origin of universities, in full force. For instance, a student can compel a citizen to let him his house and his horse; an injury, done even to his relations, must be made good fourfold; he is not obliged to fulfil the written commands of the Pope; the neighbourhood must indemnify him for what is stolen from him; if he and a non-student are living at variance, the latter only can be expelled from the boarding-house; a Doctor is obliged to support a poor student; if he is killed, the next ten houses are laid under interdict till the murderer is discovered; his legacies are not abridged by falcidia, &c. &c.
Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple sounding-holes; and by the road, courteously took off his hat before the empty windows of the Castle: houses of quality were to him like persons of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every spare penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise him in the good graces of the Fräulein; for women feel their hearts much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother some of his benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest, that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or even reposing tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction like an order of nobility does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother; as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own. There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than that of the Echo; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into Resonance together.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and that instead of the whole dinner fragments which tomorrow might themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people, now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crum of the precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday, and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he. Fixlein,—the counterpart of great men and geniuses,—was inclined to treat, to gift, to gratify a serving house-mate, rather than a man who is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honour in him, and notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly gave it away in cases of honour, and unwillingly in cases of overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was exercising the jus compascui on the cake, and six arms were peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing, except Meusel's Gelehrtes Deutschland,[36] he could not figure: the Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he, by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
[36] Literary Germany; a work (I believe of no great merit) which Richter often twitches in the same style.—Ed.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for he had still much to do.
After supper, he was just about visiting the Fräulein, when he descried her in person, like a lily dipt in the red twilight, in the Castle-garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever there, &c. &c.,—the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present Book.
Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat: for he had not risked taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He delivered her a long neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man: they reverence us infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often like better,—also by reason of our sublime air,—if they can catch us in the dark too. Him Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the Quintus, in her will: her he edified by his Literary History, as relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among red bean-blossoms, red may-chafers, before the red of the twilight burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden; and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice, which opened in the bottom of a larger one.