The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV by Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke

E >> Editor in Chief: Kuno Francke >> The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV

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Dian, who nowhere stayed more reluctantly than upon such tragic cliffs
hanging over, as it were, into the sea of eternity, almost leaped off
from them with a joke; like the Greeks, he blended dances with
tragedy! "Many a thing is preserved here, friend!" said he; "in
Adrian's church yonder they will still show you the bones of the three
men that walked in the fire." "That is just the frightful play of
destiny," replied Albano, "to occupy the heights of the mighty
ancients with monks shorn down into slaves."

"The stream of time drives new wheels," said Dian "yonder lies Raphael
twice buried.[5]" * * * And so they climbed silently and speedily over
rubbish and torsos of columns, and neither gave heed to the mighty
emotion of the other.

Rome, like the Creation, is an entire wonder, which gradually
dismembers itself into new wonders, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, St.
Peter's church, Raphael, etc.

With the passage through the church of St. Peter, the knight began the
noble course through Immortality. The Princess let herself, by the tie
of Art, be bound to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten
with edifices than with any other work of man, so did he see from
afar, with holy heart, the long mountain-chain of Art, which again
bore upon itself hills, so did he stop before the plain, around which
the enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues.
In the centre shoots up the Obelisk, and on its right and left an
eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud Church of the
world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple
toward Heaven, looks down upon the earth. But how wonderfully, as they
drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown
away from the vision!

He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses,
kings and popes, with the consciousness, that, like the world-edifice,
it was continually enlarging and receding more and more the longer one
remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble who held
an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by
nearness till they were giants. At length they stood at the main
altar and its hundred perpetual lamps. What a place! Above them the
heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them
an over-arched city of four streets in which stood churches. The
temple became greatest by walking in it; and, when they passed round
one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed
earnestly down.

Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no
art," said he to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with
the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands within
and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of and close
before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract
ideas, said he was perfectly right. Fraischdoerfer replied, "The
sublime also here lies only in the brain, for the whole church stands,
after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the
heavens; in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel
anything." He also complained that "the place for the sublime in his
head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments
which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself."
Gaspard, taking everything in a large sense, remarked, "When the
sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and
annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as
evidence the tower of the Minster,[6] and Nature itself, which is not
made smaller by its grasses and villages.

Among so many connoisseurs of art, the Princess enjoyed in silence.

The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and
cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world,
Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed, very
zealously, the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let
this follow immediately after the impression of Saint Peter's church.
They went thither. How simply and grandly the hall opens! Eight
yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically as the head of the
Homeric Jupiter its temple arches itself. It is the Rotunda or
Pantheon. "O the pigmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new
temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you
have built enough!" [7] They stepped in. There rose round about them a
holy, simple, free world-structure, with its heaven-arches soaring and
striving upward, an Odeum of the tones of the Sphere-music, a world in
the world! And overhead[8] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky
gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty
arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but
the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ gods endured and
concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.

Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred
the larger church of Saint Peter. The knight approved, and said that
youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated
the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man
ripened from strong to beautiful, as the body of the same ripens from
the beautiful into the strong; however, he himself preferred the
Pantheon. "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts,
Fraischdoerfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini-like
turrets?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian
(who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good
figure except in the esthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the
exhibition-hall as painter), "we moderns are, without contradiction,
stronger in criticism; though in practice we are, collectively and
individually, blockheads." Bouverot remarked that the Corinthian
columns might be higher. The Counsellor of Arts said that after all he
knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one,
which he had found in Herculaneum molded in ashes, of the bosom of a
fair fugitive. The knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust
and went to the Princess.

He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Sophocles here,
Shakespeare there; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more
easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new
countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of
Heaven, not through a hazy horizon, transfigured, in her eyes, the
beautiful and excited countenance of the youth; and she took for
granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form.
When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare, Sophocles also
is contained, not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles--and upon Peter's
Church stands Angelo's Rotunda!", just then the lofty cloud, all at
once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the
ravished Sun, like the eye of a Venus floating through her ancient
heavens--for she once stood even here--looked mildly in from the upper
deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the
porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy
of wonder and delight, and said with low voice: "How transfigured at
this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes
forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its
reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!" The Princess
looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and
said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"

On the next moonlit evening, Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that
the Coliseum, with its giant-circle, might the first time stand in
fire before them. The knight would fain have gone around alone with
his son, dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden
time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish
to share with the noble youth his great moments, and perhaps, in fact,
her heart and his own. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an
idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it, then, against
love, and crowds out persons; whereas with woman all ideas easily
become human beings.

They passed over the Forum, by the _Via Sacra_, to the Coliseum, whose
lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They
stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four
colonnades one above another, and the torchlight shot up into the
arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead, and
deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They
stepped in and ascended the mountain, full of fragments of rock, from
one seat of the spectators to another. Gaspard did not venture to the
sixth or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the
Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the
round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed
nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human
blood. The lurid glare of the torches penetrated into the clefts and
caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the
great shadows of the moon, which, like departed spirits, hovered in
caverns. Toward the south, where the streams of centuries and
barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades.
Temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs,
and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.

"What a people!" said Albano. "Here curled the giant snake five times
about Christianity. Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down
below there upon the green arena, where once stood the Colossus of the
Sun-god. The star of the north[9] glimmers low through the windows,
and the Serpent and the Bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The
Princess answered that "twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre,
and that a great many more had bled therein." "O! we too have
building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too,
still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past, without
it, must bring forth a future."

The Princess went to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming
wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing: the autumnal wind of the
past swept over the stubble. On this holy eminence he saw the
constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid
of Cestius; but all became Past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as
upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age,
as if they were still its kings and judges.

"This to remember the place and time!" said the approaching Princess,
handing him the laurel and the flower. "Thou mighty One! a Coliseum is
thy flower-pot; to thee is nothing too great, and nothing too small!"
said he, and threw the Princess into considerable confusion, till she
observed that he meant not her, but nature. His whole being seemed
newly and painfully moved, and, as it were, removed to a distance: he
looked down after his father, and went to find him; he looked at him
sharply, and spoke of nothing more this evening.

THE OPENING OF THE WILL

From the _Flegeljahre_ (1804)

By JEAN PAUL

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING

Since Haslau had been a princely residence no one could remember any
event--the birth of the heir apparent excepted--that had been awaited
with such curiosity as the opening of the Van der Kabel will. Van der
Kabel might have been called the Haslau Croesus--and his life
described as a pleasure-making mint, or a washing of gold sand under a
golden rain, or in whatever other terms wit could devise. Now, seven
distant living relatives of seven distant deceased relatives of Kabel
were cherishing some hope of a legacy, because the Croesus had sworn
to remember them. These hopes, however, were very faint. No one was
especially inclined to trust him, as he not only conducted himself on
all occasions in a gruffly moral and unselfish manner--in regard to
morality, to be sure, the seven relatives were still beginners--but
likewise treated everything so derisively and possessed a heart so
full of tricks and surprises that there was no dependence to be placed
upon him. The eternal smile hovering around his temples and thick
lips, and the mocking falsetto voice, impaired the good impression
that might otherwise have been made by his nobly cut face and a pair
of large hands, from which New Year's presents, benefit performances,
and gratuities were continually falling. Wherefore the birds of
passage proclaimed the man, this human mountain-ash in which they
nested and of whose berries they ate, to be in reality a dangerous
trap; and they seemed hardly able to see the visible berries for the
invisible snares.

Between two attacks of apoplexy he made his will and deposited it with
the magistrate. Though half dead when, he gave over the certificate
to the seven presumptive heirs he said in his old tone of voice that
he did not wish this token of his decease to cause dejection to mature
men whom he would much rather think of as laughing than as weeping
heirs. And only one of them, the coldly ironical Police-Inspector
Harprecht, answered the smilingly ironical Croesus: "It was not in
their power to determine the extent of their collective sympathy in
such a loss."

At last the seven heirs appeared with their certificate at the city
hall. These were the Consistorial Councilor Glanz, the Police
Inspector, the Court-Agent Neupeter, the Attorney of the Royal
Treasury Knol, the Bookseller Passvogel, the Preacher-at-Early-Service
Flachs, and Herr Flitte from Alsace. They duly and properly requested
of the magistrates the charter consigned to the latter by the late
Kabel, and asked for the opening of the will. The chief executor of
the will was the officiating Burgomaster in person, the
under-executors were the Municipal-Councilors. Presently the charter
and the will were fetched from the Council-chamber into the
Burgomaster's office, they were passed around to all the Councilors
and the heirs, in order that they might see the privy seal of the city
upon them, and the registry of the consignment written by the town
clerk upon the charter was read aloud to the seven heirs. Thereby it
was made known to them that the charter had really been consigned to
the magistrates by the late departed one and confided to them _scrinio
rei publicae_, likewise that he had been in his right mind on the day
of the consignment. The seven seals which he himself had placed upon
it were found to be intact. Then--after the Town-Clerk had again drawn
up a short record of all this--the will was opened in God's name and
read aloud by the officiating Burgomaster. It ran as follows:

"I, Van der Kabel, do draw up my will on this seventh day of May 179-,
here in my house in Haslau, in Dog Street, without a great ado of
words, although I have been both a German notary and a Dutch _domine_.
Notwithstanding, I believe that I am still sufficiently familiar with
the notary's art to be able to act as a regular testator and
bequeather of property.

"Testators are supposed to commence by setting forth the motives which
have caused them to make their will. These with me, as with most, are
my approaching death, and the disposal of an inheritance which is
desired by many. To talk about the funeral and such matters is too
weak and silly. That which remains of me, however, may the eternal sun
above us make use of for one of his verdant springs, not for a gloomy
winter!

"The charitable bequests, about which notaries must always inquire, I
shall attend to by setting aside for three thousand of the city's
paupers an equal number of florins so that in the years to come, on
the anniversary of my death, if the annual review of the troops does
not happen to take place on the common that day, they can pitch their
camp there and have a merry feast off the money, and afterward clothe
themselves with the tent linen. To all the schoolmasters of our
Principality also I bequeath to every man one august d'or, and I leave
my pew in the Court church to the Jews of the city. My will being
divided into clauses, this may be taken as the first.

"SECOND CLAUSE

It is the general custom for legacies and disinheritances to be
counted among the most essential parts of the will. In accordance with
this custom Consistorial Councillor Glanz, Attorney of the Royal
Treasury Knol, Court-Agent Peter Neupeter, Police-Inspector Harprecht,
the Preacher-at-Early-Service Flachs, the Court-bookseller Passvogel
and Herr Flitte, for the time being receive nothing; not so much
because no _Trebellianica_ is due them as the most distant relatives,
or because most of them have themselves enough to bequeath, as because
I know out of their own mouths that they love my insignificant person
better than my great wealth, which person I therefore leave them,
little as can be got out of it."

Seven preternaturally long faces at this point started up like the
Seven-sleepers. The Consistorial Councillor, a man still young but
celebrated throughout all Germany for his oral and printed sermons,
considered himself the one most insulted by such taunts. From the
Alsatian Flitte there escaped an oath accompanied by a slight smack of
the tongue. The chin of Flachs, the Preacher-at-Early-Service, grew
downward into a regular beard.

The City Councillors could hear several softly ejaculated obituaries
referring to the late Kabel under the name of scamp, fool, infidel,
etc. But the officiating Burgomaster waved his hand, the Attorney of
the Royal Treasury and the Bookseller again bent all the elastic steel
springs of their faces as if setting a trap, and the Burgomaster
continued to read, although with enforced seriousness.

"THIRD CLAUSE

I make an exception of the present house in Dog Street which, after
this my third clause, shall, just as it stands, devolve upon and
belong to that one of my seven above-named relatives, who first,
before the other six rivals, can in one half hour's time (to be
reckoned from the reading of the Clause) shed one or two tears over
me, his departed uncle, in the presence of an estimable magistrate who
shall record the same. If, however, all eyes remain dry, then the
house likewise shall fall to the exclusive heir whom I am about to
name."

Here the Burgomaster closed the will, remarked that the condition was
certainly unusual but not illegal, and the court must adjudge the
house to the first one who wept. With which he placed his watch, which
pointed to half-past eleven, on the office-table, and sat himself
quietly down in order in his capacity of executor to observe, together
with the whole court, who should first shed the desired tear over the
testator. It cannot fairly be assumed that, as long as the earth has
stood, a more woe-begone and muddled congress ever met upon it than
this one composed of seven dry provinces assembled together, as it
were, in order to weep. At first some precious minutes were spent
merely in confused wondering and in smiling; the congress had been
placed too suddenly in the situation of the dog who, when about to
rush angrily at his enemy, heard the latter call out: Beg!--and who
suddenly got upon his hind legs and begged, showing his teeth. From
cursing they had been pulled up too quickly into weeping.

Every one realized that genuine emotion was not to be thought of;
downpours do not come quite so much on the gallop; such sudden baptism
of the eyes was out of the question; but in twenty-six minutes
something might happen.

The merchant Neupeter asked if it were not an accursed business and a
foolish joke on the part of a sensible man, and he refused to lend
himself to it; but the thought that a house might swim into his purse
on a tear caused him a peculiar irritation of the glands, which made
him look like a sick lark to whom a clyster is being applied with an
oiled pinhead--the house being the head.

The Attorney of the Royal Treasury Knol screwed up his face like a
poor workman, whom an apprentice is shaving and scraping on a Saturday
evening by the light of a shoemaker's candle; he was furiously angry
at the misuse made of the title "Will" and quite near to shedding
tears of rage.

The crafty Bookseller Passvogel at once quietly set about the matter
in hand; he hastily went over in his mind all the touching things
which he was publishing at his own expense or on commission, and from
which he hoped to brew something; he looked the while like a dog that
is slowly licking off the emetic which the Parisian veterinary, Demet,
had smeared on his nose; it would evidently be some time before the
desired effect would take place.

Flitte from Alsace danced around in the Burgomaster's office, looked
laughingly at all the serious faces and swore he was not the richest
among them, but not for all Strasburg and Alsace besides was he
capable of weeping over such a joke.

At last the Police-Inspector looked very significantly at him and
declared: In case Monsieur hoped by means of laughter to squeeze the
desired drops out of the well-known glands and out of the Meibomian,
the caruncle, and others, and thus thievishly to cover himself with
this window-pane moisture, he wished to remind him that he could gain
just as little by it as if he should blow his nose and try to profit
by that, as in the latter case it was well known that more tears
flowed from the eyes through the _ductus nasalis_ than were shed in
any church-pew during a funeral sermon. But the Alsatian assured him
he was only laughing in fun and not with serious intentions.

The Inspector for his part tried to drive something appropriate into
his eyes by holding them wide open and staring fixedly.

The Preacher-at-Early-Service Flachs looked like a Jew beggar riding a
runaway horse. Meanwhile his heart, which was already overcast with
the most promising sultry clouds caused by domestic and
church-troubles, could have immediately drawn up the necessary water,
as easily as the sun before bad weather, if only the floating-house
navigating toward him had not always come between as a much too
cheerful spectacle, and acted as a dam.

The Consistorial Councillor had learned to know his own nature from
New Year's and funeral sermons, and was positive that he himself would
be the first to be moved if only he started to make a moving address
to others. When therefore he saw himself and the others hanging so
long on the drying-line, he stood up and said with dignity: Every one
who had read his printed works knew for a certainty that he carried a
heart in his breast, which needed to repress such holy tokens as tears
are--so as not thereby to deprive any fellowman of something--rather
than laboriously to draw them to the surface with an ulterior motive.
"This heart has already shed them, but in secret, for Kabel was my
friend," he said, and looked around.

He noticed with pleasure that all were sitting there as dry as wooden
corks; at this special moment crocodiles, stags, elephants, witches,
ravens[10] could have wept more easily than the heirs, so disturbed
and enraged were they by Glanz. Flachs was the only one who had a
secret inspiration. He hastily summoned to his mind Kabel's charities
and the mean clothes and gray hair of the women who formed his
congregation at the early-service, Lazarus with his dogs, and his own
long coffin, and also the beheading of various people, Werther's
Sorrows, a small battlefield, and himself--how pitifully here in the
days of his youth he was struggling and tormenting himself over the
clause of the will--just three more jerks of the pump-handle and he
would have his water and the house.

"O Kabel, my Kabel!" continued Glanz, almost weeping for joy at the
prospect of the approaching tears of sorrow. "When once beside your
loving heart covered with earth my heart too shall mol--"

"I believe, honored gentlemen," said Flachs mournfully, arising and
looking around, his eyes brimming over, "I am weeping." After which he
sat down again and let them flow more cheerfully; he had feathered his
nest. Under the eyes of the other heirs he had snatched away the
prize-house from Glanz, who now extremely regretted his exertions,
since he had quite uselessly talked away half of his appetite. The
emotion of Flachs was placed on record and the house in Dog Street was
adjudged to him for good and all. The Burgomaster was heartily glad to
see the poor devil get it. It was the first time in the principality
of Haslau that the tears of a school-master and teacher-of-the-church
had been metamorphosed, not like those of the Heliades into light
amber, which incased an insect, but like those of the goddess Freya,
into gold. Glanz congratulated Flachs, and gayly drew his attention to
the fact that perhaps he, Glanz, had helped to move him. The rest drew
aside, by their separation accentuating their position on the dry road
from that of Flachs on the wet; all, however, remained intent upon the
rest of the will.

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