It must never be supposed that I would vent here personal resentment upon tutors in a body, for, in the first place, I never had any tutor at all, and, secondly, I have been one myself, and a proper one.
Concert.--The Hero Gets a Fashionable Tutor.
I have betaken myself to a new section because I have therein to present to the reader a new person--the Tutor of my hero.
I need not remind a soul, that the Captain looked for so foolish a thing--a thing now too pliable, now too bashful--such a moralizing, spiritless thing as a tutor, in Scheerau, in order that his child might get a regent at the same time with the country. Now, he had there a godfather, who practiced law, music, small talk and the lorgnette and the world's manners; but he had not the courage to propose to that party the office of instruction in a seminary of which the number of pupils amounted to one male. I will just say it out at once, that I myself am this godfather and this new personage; but it will stand my modesty in better stead, if, in a section where I must needs bring forward so much in my own praise, I transpose myself out of the first person into the third, and say merely godfather, not I.
This godfather blew in the Unter-Scheerau Concert, in order, with his flute, to accompany the heavenly voice of a very young Fraülein von Röper, whose throat could often hardly be distinguished from the flute. The whole soul of this damsel is a nightingale's tone under an overhanging curtain of blossoms; her body is a falling, heavenly-pure snowflake, which lasts only in the ether and melts away on the filthy ground. The flutist's eyes and heart were arrested, during the pauses, by a beautiful child, who was lost in a dreamy, phantasying gaze of rapturous attention: it was Gustavus. His first look, after the accompaniment, was toward the neighborhood of the child, in order to find his owner--the first step the godfather took was to the other godparent, the Captain, whose friendly relations with me are well enough known. The male sex is more fortunate and less envious than the female, because the former is able to appreciate with the whole soul two kinds of beauty, male and female; whereas women, for the most part, love only that of the other sex. I, however, have, perhaps, too much enthusiasm for that exalted thing, manly beauty, as well as for poetic enthusiasm, notwithstanding that, of the latter at least, I myself have nothing. From Gustavus the double enchantment acted upon me; I forgot all the enchantresses of the concert in the enchanter; but in the end I was sad, because I could win fewer words than glances from the lovely boy. To the concert, moreover, I, like the rest of the hearers, paid attention only so long as I myself was a fellow-laborer, or as long as one of my female pupils played; for the Scheerau concerts are merely town-talk and prosaic melodramas set to music, wherein the gossip of the hearers in their seats runs along as printed text under the composition. For the rest we subscribe to our concerts more for our children's sake than our own; the musical school-youth get there a dancing floor and riding-school for their fingers and one at least of my catechumens weekly thrums and thrashes the harpsichord. I encourage the parents to this, and say that in such a concert-hall the little ones learn time, because of that there is not only enough there, but more than enough, inasmuch as every musical functionary there pipes, beats, strikes, stamps his own original time, which, in the first place, no one of his neighbors pipes, beats, strikes or stamps after him, and which he himself, secondly, improves from minute to minute. And even if this were not so, I tell them, still there is true musical expression there, and enough to spare; every one expresses there his own emotions, whether of embarrassment or of complete confusion, on his particular instrument; and Bach's rule, to render dissonances forcibly and consonances faintly, every one understands in a hall where the consonances melt in so softly that one can hardly catch a single one of them, and fancies he hears only the discords.