Transfer of the Princess.–Smuggling of a Kiss.–Montre À Regulateur.–Simultaneous Love.

Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.

In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.

Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.

In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and say rather, men who write much make fast writers.

And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach; but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in case of accident this is a true wheel of fortune. Reinhold read Kant's Critique through five times before he understood it. I pledge myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half as often.

To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in the intestines, which GÖtze saw, before a light, leap to the height of three inches.

Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ... Stultis sat!^[119]

In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood, with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen the Princess–except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait for it all....

Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his nose,–fill up pipe and glass,–change his position, if he rides upon a so-called reading-ass,^[120]–press the book smoothly open, and say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that description!"–I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.

For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any school-act of the Court,–e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,–such a drinker pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes them perfectly ridiculous,–hence even spectators, on account of such accidental touches, laugh at them in naturÂ;^[121]–he pledges himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic, that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact, that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some) been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the Scienti media^[122] of courts,–therefrom, I say, one should promise one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive his people off, but they always took it as a joke.

It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by investitura per zonam, or per annulum, or per baculum secularem.^[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy, with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose, as much and more unity of place–(three chambers)–of time–(a forenoon)–and of interest–(the whole joke)–in my hands, as I need. And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do, the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic gravamina of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at once what comic sources he was to avoid;–such an author can safely, without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers, that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict the following

HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.

IN FIVE ACTS.

The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain from it.

Act First.–Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play, the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of correlation (Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it. These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central one.

The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn, would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees. But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal halves,–whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because–it is over....

I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner; for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.

Act Second.–The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on paper is already two pages long....

Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly dÉbut concealed, it is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,–all these charms, which grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot, especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to–arrive.

Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses, who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No. 1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;–at the same moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At this moment two countries–properly only their abstracted and evaporated spirits–stand quite near each other, and now all depends upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a Papal brain-chamber, had we not the string; but that we have, and this keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame–honesty feels the greatest–that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon them, where they would apply the cord,–to the floor, or to Italian hands or to Italian necks?

When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the velvet chair,–then should the Universal History quote the author from whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.

Third Act.–In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are listening-brethren.^[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon speeches were whispered,–two by the Italian minister,–two, also, by the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),–none by the bride, which was a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.

Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if I should say nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to obtain by begging and to append a little extra-leaf, and therein to say something.

AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.

Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,–not to the people, but still to their curatores absentes.^[125] Even so is there in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has, like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its spirit (of freedom), but only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are ripe for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is pictured still oftener than the bird Phoenix) holds herself indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced number of her worshippers, by their worth and ardor, since her few epopts^[126] or initiates–the Bashaws–enjoy her influence in a measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without knots (inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of relieved work,–or something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds, only in high cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in long ones.

A despot is the practical reason of a whole country; the subjects are just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to his favorites);–even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the magnetic needle which guided the ship of state; a despot consists, as their throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says Parere scire, par imperio gloria est;^[127] a negro slave, therefore, wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. Servi pro nullis habentur;^[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne, fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton, Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for his freedom (slaves contend for another's) even with the death of otherwise good men and friends.

End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom enjoyed in Despotisms.

The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter and more serious than the former has been.

Fourth Act.–By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is sitting–came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does not say its farewell,–that has already been said privately,–but merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united Italians was from the middle chamber to–Italy.

The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off from their faces, whose hard parts were en haut-relief,–the German were en bas-relief, a nobler glimmer than that which courts communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....

When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed to show any other pearls than Oriental ones, (although the dream and the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening land,–tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to shed a tear!–might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction, as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...

Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said, when in Hanover, "that poets and magistri legentes, when they pass by a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank, the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."

But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,–who, as flowers with souls, hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed, on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul, which finds no place in the Court-almanac....

This Act consists of nothing but goings: in fact, this whole comedy resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was providing of household furniture for the coming existence; in the second, the arrival; in the third, talking; in the fourth, learning to walk, &c.

When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed to the wedded bed, but–from the Italian territory of the apartment into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new court, take 4½ paces and–sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last, the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves. Each one in the right wing–the left not at all–felt the dignity of what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with personal pride came–as according to Plattner pride is akin to the sublime–quite apropos to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets, buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the Adamitish portion of the Dramatis PersonÆ, among whom, unfortunately, I see the apothecary Zeusel.

We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into the presence of the Regent and Patient.

No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms. Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some Easter-lambs or agnus Dei's of pages' faces, soft and white as mites; a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her breast.

Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has the Princess by the wing–the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has in his old days–his nights are still older–buttoned himself into a complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoÖlogical fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing of the swine's snouts are there in naturÂ.^[129] I must now see and suffer it,–as he does everything in the past,–while he, fuddled with vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats, runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for the trouble to write–

Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there still continued to be nothing done,–whereas Tragedy-makers and Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into the Postscript,–nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction; namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,–and of Comedies, where Love does it,–so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an undressing.

End of the Benefit-Comedy.

I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government, which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out the comic,–that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing must hold in regard to the stuff they work;–one must then see at once, from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....

My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial sermon against something which imperial cities and towns preach in favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray, and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,–not in doing absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of joy,–what were more laudable?–but with the whimsicalities of torture, with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of antechambers, on the tratto di corda of tight-strung ceremonials.... My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but life is so short that it does not repay the trouble to make one's self a long queue^[130] therein.–Could we not shake out our hair, and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a cursÉd ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer day than the diet^[131] of Ratisbon."

While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop. Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who is stupid as a cow but once, then I have peace for the rest of my life." But, unluckily, the so-called smallest (the sister), whose understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he took our smallest on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman did him, and called this clever one sweet names over her head, all of which he dedicated with his eyes to the stupid one (at court he will dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the spying eyes of the smallest, merely in order to do it a third time in earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand brought her into a position, where he could,–especially as she allowed it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere pleasure of guessing it,–amidst his court-services to the blind one, offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so many avant-propos and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well; if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.

He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most costly articles. No man knew the & Co.,–only Zeusel looked more sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before." Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily, for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the shaping-iron." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and bought, instead of flowers, a montre À rÉgulateur,^[132] which she requested to have brought over to her.

He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no less with his own hand–the reader will be frightened, but at first he himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last he approved it–had he previously stuck on, above the Imperator of the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he had written, in pearl type: "Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut tort; moi je cache celui de ma dÉesse et j'ai raison."^[133]

"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or thy lady reader think?

She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court. Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were carried round on a peculiar vis-À-vis, called a thensa,^[134]–or in a portrait-box, called [Greek: ?a??, naos],^[135]–or in a cage, called [Greek: kadiskon].^[136]

Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line and barring-chain,–drew it up like a disgusting hair,–felt of it,–held it first far from his eye, then near to it,–and pulled it apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,–a silk ribbon may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the ground,–nevertheless this much you see, partner,–if an Alexander should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a barriÈre-alliance of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to the empty sepulchre,–that is, to the bed of the risen bride,–into which the sponsus could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall. Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which, thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow, as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:^[137] "Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,–each drawing the other into its eyes,–listening to each other's sighs,–breathing away from each other the soft, transparent words,–that were what you and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"–He sprang up, gently patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams; betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O—, with his fine, ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this. It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone–while to the Englishman even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols as so many elegant pas, forward capers and backward capers and side-capers–cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and composure.

At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers, baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his "Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:

The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly, before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he could not comprehend it."–The morning before his departure, Victor was in a double embarrassment,–he was very desirous of having a present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump hour-watch,^[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers. This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,^[139] an amulet, an Ignatius's-plate,^[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the sunny side as on the stormy side,–man stands more firmly in mud than on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds. Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball^[141] for the Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the threefold hands made, after all, only one hour.–Lind swapped.

Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish^[142] reformer of such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy normal years, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such second-telling watches indicate and strike.

–At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very beautiful daughter of the Count of O— did not come back until seven o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still sitting there.

The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well known, differs from a canonical merely in this,–that in the apocryphal I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.

I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to himself?–He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda; she, by her magnetizing, has put him en rapport with the whole female world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more peace.–A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her recruiting-license.

But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier reasons,^[143]–1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?

1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no description of it extant but mine,–namely, in our days, reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards, coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an associÉe, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,–or exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk or clover, or on Kant's Prolegomena,–or scrapes the powder from her forehead some five times with the powder-knife,–or with her, and by her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,–or actually at the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour) quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;–then is this much certain,–that the aforesaid youth (provided refinement, feeling, and reflection hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is, if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too unripe for love,–which borders on the former, because it includes several objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-^[144]love. Examples are odious; else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding love,–confederate-tenderness,–general warmth,–the fidelity of adopted childhood.

To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when paired love is, by the demands of a greater metallic and moral capital, made more rare, hold out three years.

2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women was his maternal mark,–i. e. a resemblance to his own and every mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace–that is, the leap–of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,–that their love springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness. An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will," he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such spacious heart-chambers–one can turn round therein–and two such neat heart's-alcoves–the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched upon–merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out–as in a toll-house or pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going–one cannot count, if one is there to see–it is a beautiful temple in which there is right of thoroughfare.–Such regard not the few who so shut themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."

Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed–though there might be ever so much surplus room–even so far as to get into the heart's ears, which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so they quarter the good rogue merely in the coldest place away up under the eaves of the head not far from the hair-pins,^[145]–and there he is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh Chapter....

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