* * * * *
Alas for us unhappy guests of the Spring! It is all over with the pleasures of Lilienbad. The above superscription my brother could still make, before hurrying off to Maussenbach. For there Gustavus lies in prison. It is all incomprehensible. My friend Beata sinks under the news we have received and which came to-day in the following letter to my brother from Dr. Fenk. Probably the following Job's-post will conclude this whole book as well as our previous happy days.
* * * * *
"I will not, as a woman would, spare thee, my dear friend, but relate to thee at once the whole extraordinary blow which has smitten our happy hours and most of all those of our two friends.
"Three days after our charming night--dost thou still remember a certain remark of Ottomar about the danger of raptures?--Professor Hoppedizel undertakes to carry out his inconsiderate joke of breaking into the palace of Maussenbach. The sly hunter Robisch was just then away from home; but had gone for fun with thy predecessor, the Government Counsellor Kolb, on a cruise after thieves. Observe, a multitude of persons and circumstances are involved here, which can hardly have been brought together by accident.
"The Professor comes with six comrades, and brings a ladder with him, in order to set it up against a window which had been broken for years and which looks over towards Auenthal. But when he comes up under the window--lo! one is already standing there. He takes it as the most fortunate accident and they go up in a body, almost on each other's heels. At the top a hand reaches out a silver sword-belt as if offering it to some one--the Professor seizes both and leaps in at the window. There he found what appeared to be a thief, who was expecting accomplices on the ladder. The thievish realist, in the fury of desperation falls upon the nominalist--the gallery on the ladder tumbles in after him and increases the fighting melèe. The thumps upon the floor startle the listening Röper less out of his sleep than out of his bed--he alarms the whole house and they his tipstaff--to tell all in a word: in a few minutes, with the fury of a miser saving and clutching his goods, he had made both the humorous and the serious thieves prisoners, however much the true thief might lay about him and however much the Professor might argue. And now all are sitting fast and waiting for thee.
"--Ah! wilt thou be able to bear it--if I tell thee all? The scouts of Kolb and Robisch find around Maussenbach the associates of the captured thief--they penetrate the woods, they go to a cave, as if they knew it led to something--they find a subterranean human world. Oh, that of all men thou to thy sorrow shouldst have been destined to be found there, thou innocent and unfortunate one! Now thy tender heart beats even against a prison wall!--Must I name to thee thy friend Gustavus?--Haste, haste, that the course of things may be changed!
"Lo! not merely on thy breast, but upon mine also has this day laid a heavy load. Canst thou endure that I should tell thee more still?--that it is the merest chance that Ottomar still lives. I carried him the news of our misfortune. With a frightful struggle of his nature, in which every fibre battled with a different horror, he heard me through, and then asked me whether no one had been taken prisoner who had six fingers. 'I took a solemn oath,' said he, 'in that hole in the woods, never to reveal to a soul our subterranean league, until an hour before my death. Fenk, I will now divulge the whole secret. My supplications and struggles availed nothing; he told me all, 'Gustavus must be vindicated,' said he. But this history is nowhere safe, hardly in the most faithful bosom, least of all on this paper. Ottomar was attacked by his so-called moment-of-annihilation. I let not his hand go out of mine, so that he might outlive his hour and break his oath. There is nothing higher than a man who despises life; and in this lofty position my friend stood before me, who, in his cave, had risked more and lived better than all they in Scheerau. I saw upon him the sign that he meant to die. It was right. We were in the chamber where the wax mummies stand with the black garlands, to remind man how little he was, and how little he is. 'Bend thy head aside,' said he (for I chained myself to him), 'that I may look into Sirius--that I may see out into the infinite heavens and have a solace--that I may transport myself over an earth more or less. O friend, make not dying so bitter to me--and be neither angry nor sad. O, see how all heaven gleams from one infinity to another, how it lives and nothing is dead up yonder; the human originals of all these waxen corpses dwell there in that blue.--O ye departed ones, to-day I too join you, into whatever sun my human spark of light may fly, when the body melts away from it. I shall find you again.'"
"The striking of every quarter of an hour had up to this time pierced my heart; but the last quarter struck upon my ear like a funeral knell; I watched anxiously his hands and steps; he fell on my neck: 'No! no!' said I, 'here is no parting--I shall hate thee into the very grave, if thou hast any design--embrace me not.' He had already done it; his whole being was a throbbing heart; he would fain expire in the very emotion of friendship; I pressed his bosom to mine, and his soul to mine: 'I embrace thee,' said he, 'on the earth; into whatever world death may cast me, never shall I forget thee; I shall there look toward the earth and spread out my arms after the earthly friend and nothing shall fill these arms but the faithful, heavy-laden breast which here has suffered with me, here with me has endured the earth.... Behold! thou weepest and yet wouldst not embrace me! O beloved!--on thy bosom I feel not the vanity of earth----thou too wilt die!... Mighty Being above the earth!' ... Here he tore himself away from me and fell on his knees and prayed: 'Destroy me not, punish me not! I go away from this earth; thou knowest what man comes to; thou knowest what earthly life is and our earthly condition. But, O God! man has a second heart; a second soul, his friend! Give me again the friend, together with my life--when one day all human hearts and all human blood molder in graves; O gracious, loving Being! then breathe thou over men and show Eternity their love!' A leap upward--a sudden dart towards me--a crushing embrace--a blow upon the wall--a shot from it.--
"But he still lives.
"Fenk."
FOOTNOTES:
1: The German word for the dash is Gedanken-strich: Thought-stroke: (or Pause for Reflection).--(Tr.)
2: He would not have known that, had he not got it from the new Tacticians, Messrs. Hahn & Müller, who teach the young officer the Differential Calculus in order that it may not be hard for him in the heat of battle to calculate the right base angle in wheeling and deploying. Even so have I a hundred times wanted to write a book in which to enable the poor-aiming billiard player merely by a few solutions in mechanics and higher mathematics to carom with his eyes shut.
3: An allusion to an imagined mystic virtue in the number 4.--(Tr.)
4: Lit. "Knee-piece."--(Tr.)
5: Famous grammarian and purist.--(Tr.)
6: Stieck, oder Steckte, is the German, quizzing the grammatical purists of the day.
7: Cambyses took Pelusium by storm, by interspersing among his soldiers sacred animals, cats, etc., at which the Egyptian garrison did not dare to shoot, and discharged prayers instead of arrows.
8: The "one-leg" is myself. I have made the Preface, which every one will have skipped and this note which must not be, for the purpose of making known that I have only one leg, leaving out of account the abridged one, and that in my neighborhood they call me by no other name than the "one-leg" or "one-legged author," whereas my proper name is Jean Paul. See the Baptismal Register and the Preface.
9: By which the physicians mean; 1, sleeping and waking; 2, eating of drinking; 3, motion; 4, breathing; 5, discharges; 6, passions.
10: Rastriven means literally to rule a staff for music.--(Tr.)
11: Gross-gezogen and Kleingezogen is Jean Paul's contrast.--(Tr.)
12: Ohr-rose (ear-rose.)--(Tr.)
13: In Haller's great physiology it is stated that man according to Sanctorius sheds his old body every eleven years--according to Bernouilli and Blumenbach every three years--according to the Anatomist Keil every year.
14: According to the Rabbins, the devil helped build the temple, and the worm gnawed the stones smooth.
15: The butterflies of Spring have (through the celibate) lingered over from the former year; the Autumn ones are this year's children.
16: Affirmant idem corpus existens in duobis locis habere posse utrobique, formas absolutas non dependentes--ita ut hic moveater localiter, illic non, hic calidum sit, illic frigidum, etc. hic moriatur, illic vivat, hic eliceret actus vitales tum sensitivos tum intellectivos, illic non. Vœtii disp. throl. T. 1, p. 632. Bekanas with philosophic acumen limits it so far as to say that such body--ergo a woman--cannot be pious in one place and godless in another at the same time; which is also clear to my mind.
17: Wolfe's lect. memorab. Cent. XVI. p. 994 etc.
18: Loco cit.
19: Loco cit.
20: Common to several denominations.--(Tr.)
21: A Linnæan class with hermaphrodite flowers having five stamens.--(Tr.)
22: Of Saint Theresa.--(Tr.)
23: Even children in the mother's womb. See Allgem. Deutsch. Bilb., Bd. 67 S. 138.
24: With which insects make the hole to lay their eggs in.--(Tr.)
25: "Aufgelüftet"--the word luft (Scotch, lift) gives a double sense here: lifting to give air.--(Tr.)
26: I mean a harpsichord disguised under the form of a table.
27: In Scheerau, as in some States even at this day, all mourning was forbidden the subjects.
28: Fou' is the Scotch for tipsy. See Burns. A German proverb runs: "Voll-toll." These are Jean Paul's words, "Full and foolish."--(Tr.)
29: Pantheon?--(Tr.)
30: This remark has in the la««t twenty years, if not in France yet in Germany, become much less extensively applicable.
31: "Gild refined gold." etc.--(Tr.)
32: In a child's story-telling there is the same contempt of finery, of side-glances and brevity, the same naiveté, which often seems to us caprice and yet is not, and the same forgetting of the narrator in the narrative, that we find in the stories of the Bible, the elder Greeks, etc.
33: What the moderns write in the taste of the ancients is little understood; and can it be that the ancients themselves are so frequently understood?
34: Do all Germans, then, feel the Messiah who are at home in the German language and Biblical history?
35: Lit.: "Philanthropin." A natural system of education instituted by Basidow.--(Tr.)
36: A word coined by Harvey, signifying a corrupt condition of the fluids of the body--hence ill-humor.--(Tr.)
37: The Vehmgericht.--(Tr.)
38: Stunde means both hour and league.--(Tr.)
39: "Nature's soft nurse."--Shakespeare.--(Tr.)
40: Glove, in German, is Hand-shoe.--(Tr.)
41: Gustavus's courage in kissing is, on the whole, natural. Our sex runs through three periods of boldness toward the other--the first is that of childhood, when one is yet daring with the female sex from want of feeling, etc.--the second is the era of enthusiasm, when one poetizes, but does not dare--the third is the last, in which one has experience enough to be frank and feeling enough to spare and respect the sex. Gustavus's kiss fell in the first period.
42: Apotheke--from the Greek--literally a depository.--(Tr.)
43: Frederick Jacobi in Düsseldorf. Whoever, in reading his Woldemar, the best that has yet been written upon and against the Encyclopedia; or his Allwill--in which he balances the storms of feeling with the sunshine of principle; or his Spinoza and Hume--the best upon philosophy, for and against--has admired the too great condemnation (the effect of the oldest acquaintance with all systems) or the profundity, or the fancy, or some other traits which elevate certain rarer men; such a one's ear will be sorely shocked by the first yelp, amidst which Jacobi had to enter the temple of German fame; but he has only to remember, that in Germany (not in other countries) new energetic geniuses meet always a different reception at the threshold of the temple (e. g. from barking Cerberuses) from what they find in the temple itself, where the Priests are; and even a Klopstock, a Goethe, a Herder did not fare otherwise. Nor, in fact, thou, poor Hamann in Königsberg! How many Mordecais have in the Universal German Library and in other journals, helped build thy gallows and spin for thy hangman's rope: Meanwhile thou hast happily come down from the gallows only seemingly dead.
44: Heaven grant that the reader may understand all this and still remember in some measure the first sections, where he was informed that the wife of the commercial agent Röper had been the first love of Captain Falkenberg and had brought the agent her first-born child by the Captain as a marriage morning present.
45: "Si ad illam quae cum virtute degatur, ampulla aut strigilis accedat, sumpturum sapientum eam vitam potius qua haec adjecta sint, nec beatiorem tamen ob eam causam fore." Cic. de. fin. bon. et mal. L. IV.
46: The fourth finger.--(Tr.)
47: Zum Sterben schon.--"Awfully beautiful."--(Tr.)
48: I. e., Day-board.--(Tr.)
49: A Russian title answering nearly to Baron.--(Tr.)
50: Leuterirt--lit.: referred back for explanation--(a law term)--(Tr.)
51: Bank means bench in German.--(Tr.)
52: The picture of the lost little one, which he brought with him on his neck from his abductress, and which looked so like himself.
53: Elementary maxims of the law--a Scotch term.--(Tr.)
54: General experts.--(Tr.)
55: The whole career of his father, Maria Wutz, I have appended to Vol. II. of this work. But although it is an episode, which has no other connection with the main work than is given by the thread and paste of the binder, still I trust the world will do me the favor to read it immediately after reading this note.
56: I have preferred to render word for word what seems to mean a chronic sickness or soreness.--(Tr.)
57: This name was given to the English garden around Marienhof, which the spouse of the dead Prince had laid out in a romantic, sentimental spirit, and one that went beyond all rules of art. Some one suggested to her the name and plan of the Silent Land. But, now even this land is too noisy for her dying soul, and she lives in-doors. Readers who were never there I shall oblige by a description of the garden.
58: I cannot help it, that my hero is so stupid as to hope to be useful. I am not, but I show in the sequel that the medical treatment of a cacochymic body-politic (e. g., better political, educational, and other institutions, special edicts, etc.) is like the taking of medicine by a patient of weak nerves, who works against the symptoms and not against the essence of the malady, and undertakes now to sweat off, now to vomit out, or to evacuate, or wash away his sickness by bathing.
59: The reader will remember that she had journeyed hither from the Resident Lady von Bouse's merely to join in celebrating the paternal birthday.
60: These few parts I describe but briefly: The Place of Rest is a burnt-out village with a standing church, both of which had to remain as they were, after the Princess had indemnified the inhabitants for the loss of the place and all within a quarter of a league's radius, at the greatest expense and with the help of Herr von Ottomar, to whom it belongs and who is not yet arrived there. The Flower Islands are single, separate, turf-hillocks in a pond, each decked with one different flower. The Realm of Shadows consists of a manifold lattice-and-nest-work of shadow, thrown by great and small foliage, by branches and trellises, bushes and trees in various colors on a ground of pebbles, grass or water. She had arranged the deepest and the brightest parts of shadow, some for the waning noon, and others for the evening twilight. The Dumb Cabinet was a miserable little house with two opposite doors over each of which hung a veil and which no hand whatever was permitted to unlock, except that of the Princess. To this day no one knows what is therein, but the veils are destroyed.
61: A bed invented by one Dr. Graham for lifting the invalid during change of sheets.-(Tr.)
62: See how Jean Paul has elaborated this same idea in Titan, 21st Cycle.--(Tr.)
63: See this sentiment also worked out still more fully and finely in the last paragraph of the 8th Jubilee of Titan.--(Tr.)
64: "Erectos ad sidera tollere vultus."--(Tr.)
65: "The human face divine."--(Tr.)
66: A Prince Rupert's-drop.--(Tr.)
67: A refusal.--(Tr.)
68: Aus der Luft: the German phrase for "out of the whole cloth."--(Tr.)
69: For, notoriously, man's breast is much harder and more inflexible, and like that which it sometimes encloses.--It is singular that parents let their daughters sing, with all feeling, things which they would not allow to be read to them.
70: In the Roman Pantheon there stand only two divinities: Mars and Venus.
71: As in well known, the pebble or mountain crystal concealed in the setting on a doublette, is called a culasse and the diamond blazing over it a pavillon.
72: The Rose-maiden is the one who gains the garland for her distinguished virtue.--(Tr.)
73: The three cures which, as above stated, I use against my lung disease, I have from three nations--following in freshly ploughed furrows the English advise--strengthening by a dog's bedfellowship is the advice of a Frenchman (de la Richebandiere)--breathing the air of cow-barns is prescribed to Swedish consumptives.
74: Or "Liripoop, a long tail or tippet of a hood, passing round the neck, and hanging down before."--(Worcester's Dictionary.)
75: Hollowed ice is, as is well known, applied to the head in case of headache, vertigo or madness.
76: Shakespeare's Prologues to the Henrys.--(Tr.)
77: An odd forerunner of our modern local quiz, that good Bostonians hope, when they die, to go to Paris (short for Paradise)--(Tr.)
78: Of course, German miles.--(Tr.)
79: So much the finer is it, that they keep the sentiment of love pure, thereby omnipotent; other feelings float therein, but dissolved and opaque; with men the latter merely stand beside it and independent of it.
80:
"O youth adown time's winding brook,
Toward life's vast ocean-grave I look."
The beginning runs originally:
"A wanderer sate by the rivulet's side,
And sadly the fleeting waters eyed."
--Volk-songs.
81: "Das Abendroth im ernsten Sinne glühn." (Faust.)--(Tr.)
82: According to the older theologians (e. g., Gerhard, Loc. Theol., T. VIII. p. 116, r.--) we rise without hair, stomach, lacteal vessels, etc. According to Origen we rise without finger-nails also, and what he himself had lost even in this life. According to Connor, Med. Mystic, Art. 13, we come out of the grave with no more flesh than we had at birth or conception.
83: Zückert in his Dietetics proposes a cork cuirass, which keeps one erect above water, and which, as fast as the ability to float on the top increases, may be cut off.
84: In the "Liaisons dangereuses."
85: For one might make a man crazy by insisting that he was so. The friends of the younger Crebillon once agreed, on an evening of social gaiety, not to laugh at one of his jokes, but only to maintain a pitying silence, as if he had now lost all his wit and wits. And the thing was even made credible to him. Other writers again are still more vividly deluded by their friends into the opposite error of believing that they have wit. [A curious illustration of this is given in a story in Roscoe's "Italian Novelists."--Tr.]
86: Alloying gold with copper is called the red; with silver the white.
87: That is, merely in the conventional; for there is a certain better sort, by which not always that, but cultivated goodness of heart is always accompanied.
88: A settling of blood in some cavity of the body, especially in the thorax.--(Tr.)
89: As no readers understand sober earnest less than those who cannot take a joke. I remark in a note for that class that the fact stated above is really so, and that I (as an equally intemperate water and coffee drinker) have never found any other means of bracing the nerves against suspension of pulse and breath and other weaknesses, which made all inner effort painful, of so much efficiency as--hop-beer.
90: An instrument for measuring the blue of the atmosphere.
91: According to the ancients the rare springs gathered about them all wild beasts, and these meetings, like those in masquerades, gave occasion to still more extraordinary ones, and to the proverb, "Always something new from Africa," or to miscarriages.
92: His sermons, printed a year ago, will still be to the taste of every one who shares mine.
93: "Sweet hour, that wakes the wish and melt's the heart."--Byron. (Tr.)
94: A name meaning literally black clay.--(Tr.)
95: "Schlenterten (or is it written with a soft D?)" (Original).
96: The Zahuri in Spain see through the earth down to its treasures, its lead, its metals, etc.
97: Only not on the same side, as did the original.--(Tr.)