Hesperus or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days Volume I Part 24

But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition of empty state-carriages of the G.o.d of the Sun and the Muses, because I fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228]

they would there, where often only the t.i.tles of works--and of the stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.

--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people, who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out....

Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.

M.

Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly, if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-gla.s.s--because everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229]

that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.

N.

Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces (children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews, then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as _out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to p.r.o.nounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with _vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."

O.

Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.

Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar public educational inst.i.tution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most part of the honorable and distinguis.h.i.+ng feature which it might have for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and officers of decided worth, like important doc.u.ments, should be dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the _way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees, having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often _eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth, as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their n.o.ble men in statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame....

Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.

P.

Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_, there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.

p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly, however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his _images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he would communicate to us.

I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses, twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely, ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible, the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and aesthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more _one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate Kants.

Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system; whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a Caesar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.

Q (_see_ K).

R.

Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnes_ of other men's grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland, and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual _from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.

These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly, however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1) advertis.e.m.e.nts, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and wherein I a.s.sociate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces, itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary day?

S.

Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he, surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore, that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation, my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.

I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and a.s.sign to myself the following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay: "Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand, what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of the will."

T.

Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns of thorns_, all pleasure in las.h.i.+ng about me with the thorns of satire dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or feet.

21. DOG-POST-DAY.

Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.

The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism, ceremonial behavior), and have entirely a.s.sumed instead the _genuine_ tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks, whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated laces, but with the _true_ ones.--

"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay, that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor, which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest, though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself, from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps, also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to set them at variance is much safer and easier.

He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she, like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-gla.s.ses at the back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.

"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian vivacity.

"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he, with English freedom of speech.

Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however, until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.

Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may, while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole female s.e.x appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which he had wors.h.i.+pped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compa.s.sionated Princess.

Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain partly by his to-day's a.s.siduity and partly by his influence on the Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the imperator of the compa.s.s-watch. At the former and first visit his courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and stupid.

What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following, in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--

He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy (_empress.e.m.e.nt_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but only that he had--sent him to her.

Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many _beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January succ.u.mbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.

When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything, least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compa.s.s-watch he stood daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than usual.

--Many people would sooner live without houses than without building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess, incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world and everything that may benumb its wounds!

With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half an----

EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!

The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one, under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom G.o.d gives an office, to him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat places? Thus Linnaeus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same Linnaeus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the sower of them?--

Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say, are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?

Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your s.e.x, when one travels through German cities, where every richest or most distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any fas.h.i.+on, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great, now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one!

Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the n.o.ble pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired, solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life; thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes; but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically smiling, radiant, G.o.dlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover, and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form is thy _virtue_."

_End of the Extra-Leaf_.

Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en medaillon_ with the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye, "She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is well known, is the patroness of eyes.

Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna; for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.

_Men_, like _ideas_, are a.s.sociated together quite as often on the principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself, not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the other the fine one.