The Threefold Deception of Love.–Lost Bible and Powder-puff.– Churching.–New Concordats with the Reader.

Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.^[56] If the public keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."

The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool^[57] over my eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.

There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,–like Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,–and if they were cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils^[58] and musketry against churching,–against infant-baptismal festivals,–against felling trees for Christmases and Whitsuntides,–against holidays, and against all the merry-makings of mankind.

Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,–that humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare hands, not on its covered feet, which often themselves decayed on that account,–that economical and sumptuary laws were still more needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to the lowest,–that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue, and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the ParcÆ into the greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right. Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.

I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this day the Parsonage had quite other reasons in petto than one has ever yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three interested parties wished to deceive each other,–at least, two did a third.

In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and that that personage–whom she had taken the liberty of inviting–was coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing to Victor,–at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to burn anything else white except yarn. Her beloved Victor–that was her plan–should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival^[59] also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it, and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own birthday.

Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands, who are their regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor, whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself, was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.

Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was to him–like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters–at the same time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces, the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself; but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas, and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound, like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the month-hand of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its hour-hand, and accordingly a woman its second-hand, still, after all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and second-hand.

As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one, which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose out,–his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone finely to-day, the Devil saw,–we should have had until four o'clock in the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."

At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,–when the gesture shook out of the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible, but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the weightier facts, must at least come at this one,–that the Court Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out, into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the others that were left standing,–which now could not, of course, by this most exalted spirit and pentameter,^[60] be well christened anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."

As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this hard blow still more bitter, it was this,–that Eymann's band, like his reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves^[61] as in a napkin-press; for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at all, still it was certainly better and more human–that is, more foolish–that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists^[62] they searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian, "redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in the Bible only by daylight, not by funeral-torches."

The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a ladder and much oil, but with the oil they extinguish the lamps and their own thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up to the gallows.

As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks' child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw, thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the supporting amulet of children (particularly of Dauphins), saying, meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second story, and found at his feet a smashed–mouse under his long-sought Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,^[63] for which one needs only a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates. Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then, auto-da-fÉs also?"

I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the shooting down of an army in general history,–the loss of another's hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.^[64] ... This interest arises from the source whence it comes with those Oto whom the case really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a trifle, when it takes up many moments, becomes so great to us, and this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the Orbis Pictus,^[65] consists of points–of black and golden ones–seems so long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious mood stand so near to our mirthful.

Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks, to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon did into empty pots.^[66] In German countries, mine and a few others excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,–one to recognize it, and one more to do it away. The views of a consistory always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders (circularia) do.

In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again, or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair childhood's days,–figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones, which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew, opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish sorrows here,–among them the length of the sermon,–and of his childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said Horion,–and we will say it with him,–"all was to thee as yet infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm, quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits, graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the skeleton remains there,–the latticed pew."

But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus, how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,–at evening, when we stand low in the western horizon and go out,–then, when we turn round, and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,–oh! then, how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,–the garden of childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising, and still suffused with an old, pale redness,–how much more magically will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far from the grave, and hopes here below no more.

To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year, went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with a real childish gusto to think that there were four moving creatures^[67] in the temple,–the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,^[68] and himself. Is there anything more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long, horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but stiffened statues?

After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to Apollonia, that majoress-domo,–must carry away bean-poles and seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,–fan out therefrom butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,–tie back the twigs which had grown over the windows,–lug down the orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree, out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung^[69] so often as its strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian to take part in these puppet-plays,^[70] and between them, in this preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations: "Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,–this festival may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,–even the clouds dispersed,–Clotilda would come. The primate of the festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,–the little six-weeks'-man,–memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.

The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little speaker to close his throat-lid^[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had come near suppressing–from respect for the Parson's lady–the fact that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged as others, if she had children or milk....

Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight residences,–although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,–offer a slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle, which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....

It strikes five o'clock,–the matchless beauty enters,–the moon hangs down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,–the gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the tide,–all is rehabilitated.

But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,–the dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,^[72] since I am so very busy, waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,–more so than if it were a man's boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink) that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,^[73] two workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....

But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a cannon-thunder bring up the rear,–he shall not hear it; his better half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial excrescence,–he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold assafoetida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with a woodman's axe,–he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be on my account, regularly out of his senses.

Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or sees anything except my characters, which are put in rapport with him,–neither father nor cousin,–then I may be sure that he will hear a mining-superintendent still less,–for story is what he wants, and of me he knows absolutely nothing more,–nay, I will suppose, I should let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth, like ribbons from a juggler's,–what would it avail me?

Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,–and as with me after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable stuff,^[74] that a regular intercalary day could well be made,–it shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner to wit:–

I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns, from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no narrative.

II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all beneficia juris–restitutionem in integrum–exceptionem lÆsionis enormis et enormissimÆ–-dispensationem–absolutionem, etc. At the Congress of St. John's, May 4, 1793.

Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be laid before an umpire or a confederate court,^[75] as the single ground of decision.

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