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;[57]—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.
[57] To the Spring, namely, which begins with snowdrops, and ends with roses and pinks.—
"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 grave-stones; and I think even now that Superstition[58] 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....
[58] This Christian superstition is not only a Rabbinical, but also a Roman one. Cicero de Senectute.
The Investiture on Sunday (whose Gospel, of the good shepherd, suited well with the ceremony) I must dispatch in few words; because nothing truly sublime can bear to be treated of in many. However, I shall impart the most memorable circumstances, when I say that there was—drinking (in the Parsonage),—music-making (in the Choir),—reading (of the Presentation by the Senior, and of the Ratification-rescript by the lay Rath),—and preaching, by the Consistorialrath, who took the soul-curer by the hand, and presented, made over and guaranteed him to the congregation, and them to him. Fixlein felt that he was departing as a high-priest from the church, which he had entered as a country parson; and all day he had not once the heart to ban. When a man is treated with solemnity, he looks upon himself as a higher nature, and goes through his solemn feasts devoutly.
This indenturing, this monastic profession, our Head-Rabbis and Lodge-masters (our Superintendents) have usually a taste for putting off till once the pastor has been some years ministering among the people, to whom they hereby present him; as the early Christians frequently postponed their consecration and investiture to Christianity, their baptism namely, till the day when they died: nay, I do not even think this clerical Investiture would lose much of its usefulness, if it and the declaring-vacant of the office were reserved for the same day; the rather as this usefulness consists entirely in two items; what the Superintendent and his Raths can eat, and what they can pocket.
Not till towards evening did the Parson and I get acquainted. The Investiture officials, and elevation pulley-men, had, throughout the whole evening, been very violently—breathing. I mean thus: as these gentlemen could not but be aware, by the most ancient theories and the latest experiments, that air was nothing else than a sort of rarefied and exploded water, it became easy for them to infer that, conversely, water was nothing else than a denser sort of air. Wine-drinking, therefore, is nothing else but the breathing of an air pressed together into proper spissitude, and sprinkled over with a few perfumes. Now, in our days, by clerical persons too much (fluid) breath can never be inhaled through the mouth; seeing the dignity of their station excludes them from that breathing through the smaller pores, which Abernethy so highly recommends under the name of air-bath: and can the Gullet in their case be aught else than door-neighbour to the Windpipe, the consonant and fellow-shoot of the Windpipe?—I am running astray: I meant to signify, that I this evening had adopted the same opinion; only that I used this air or ether, not like the rest for loud laughter, but for the more quiet contemplation of life in general. I even shot forth at my gossip certain speeches, which betrayed devoutness: these he at first took for jests, being aware that I was from Court, and of quality. But the concave mirror of the wine-mist at length suspended the images of my soul, enlarged and embodied like spiritual shapes, in the air before me.—Life shaded itself off to my eyes like a hasty summer night, which we little fire-flies shoot across with transient gleam;—I said to him that man must turn himself like the leaves of the great mallow, at the different day-seasons of his life, now to the rising sun, now to the setting, now to the night, towards the Earth and its graves;—I said, the omnipotence of Goodness was driving us and the centuries of the world towards the gates of the City of God, as, according to Euler, the resistance of the Ether leads the circling Earth towards the Sun, &c. &c.
On the strength of these entremets, he considered me the first theologian of his age; and had he been obliged to go to war, would previously have taken my advice on the matter, as belligerent powers were wont of old from the theologians of the Reformation. I hide not from myself, however, that what preachers call vanity of the world, is something altogether different from what philosophy so calls. When I, moreover, signified to him that I was not ashamed to be an Author; but had a turn for working up this and the other biography; and that I had got a sight of his Life in the hands of the Superintendent; and might be in case to prepare a printed one therefrom, if so were he would assist me with here and there a tint of flesh-colour,—then was my silk, which, alas! not only isolates one from electric fire, but also from a kindlier sort of it, the only grate which rose between his arms and me; for, like the most part of poor country parsons, it was not in his power to forget the rank of any man, or to vivify his own on a higher one. He said: "He would acknowledge it with veneration, if I should mention him in print; but he was much afraid his life was too common and too poor for a biography." Nevertheless, he opened me the drawer of his Letter-boxes; and said, perhaps, he had hereby been paving the way for me.
The main point, however, was, he hoped that his Errata, his Exercitationes, and his Letters on the Robber-Castle, if I should previously send forth a Life of the Author, might be better received; and that it would be much the same as if I accompanied them with a Preface.