Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;
by Jean Paul · English · Gutenberg #36164 · 1,277,285 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces;
Author: Jean Paul
Translator: A. Ewing
Release date: May 19, 2011 [eBook #36164]
Most recently updated: October 12, 2026
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36164
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES; ***
BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY.
* * *
RICHTER'S
FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.
GEORGE BELL & SONS
LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.
FLOWER, FRUIT AND THORN
PIECES;
OR, THE
WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE
OF
FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,
PARISH ADVOCATE
IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
(_A GENUINE THORN PIECE_.)
BY
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
Translated from the German
BY
ALEXANDER EWING.
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1897
[_Reprinted from Stereotype plates_.]
PREFACE
TO THE
SECOND EDITION.
What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition
of 'Siebenkæs,' embellished and perfected as it is with all the
additions, corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power
to make? Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I
daresay, buy it and read it; but not give much of their time to the
study of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in their
criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been chary of her
oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other inquirers; she has
chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them, and prophesied
little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers setting to
work, for instance, at the second edition of his 'Hesperus,'[1] with
his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist's knife in his right,
and applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent;
it was in vain, however, that he looked for anything like an
appreciative notice of it, either in literary or non-literary
publications. Similarly, in all his new editions (those of 'Fixlein,'
the 'Preparatory School,' and 'Levana,' are proofs and witnesses[2]),
however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, turning some of
the old ones' faces to the wall--marching off some ideas, relieving
them by others--making characters conduct themselves better, or worse,
or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be,--the
deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to the
world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told where
I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am _minus_, perhaps, some
little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.
This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as
matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author
incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic
class think none are necessary--their common point of agreement being
the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same
natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides,
the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the
bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the
wax for it.
Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the
condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its
author's fancy--just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous
outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none
of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all.
Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do
so as follows:--firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply
spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if
this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better
would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to
say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to
the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise
in a more roundabout form, as follows:--If a writer curbs himself too
closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than
about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up
its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible
perspiration of criticism--then they say--"the fact is, that the
thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots,
penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a
more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far." But, when
the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all
his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when
and how they will, then the critics point the _following_ moral--doing
it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of
them--"A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the
more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he
lets it go."
We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations
made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition
appeared, I have had the good fortune--partly because I have had an
opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of
the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul's letters),
partly from my correspondence with the hero of it himself--of becoming
acquainted with family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I
could not have got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and
coolly invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh
Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to communicate to the
public.
The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those
foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be
filled by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of
all the genitive final s's of compound words. But really the labour of
sweeping and striking out letters and words all through four long
volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as
by the sweeper and striker-out himself.
Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have
placed both the "Flower-pieces" at the end of the second volume[3] (for
in the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first),
and that it is no longer the first volume, but, much more
appropriately, the second, which closes with the first Fruit-piece.
And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor
improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces--particularly in that of
the Dead Christ--I have not _made_ any improvements, but left
everything as it was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the
golden writing-sand with which I had made the letters a little rough
and illegible.
The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be
so glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the
increasing of my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as
there could not be a more troublesome business than the comparing of
the old book with the improved one, page by page, as it were, I have
deposited in the school-book shop the printed copy of the old edition,
in which all the writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is
to say, all the places which have been written or stroked through, can
be easily seen at a glance, often half and whole pages done to death,
so that it would really astonish you. Critics not on the spot must,
indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of each of the
editions into the opposite scales of a grocer's balance, and then
looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old.
From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all
critics may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my
first; they may also form an idea how much I struck out of my
manuscript before printing, when they observe how much I have struck
out after printing.
Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Bayreuth, _September_, 1817.
CONTENTS.
PREFACE to the Second Edition
PREFACE, with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General
Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the "Dog Post Days,"
and these present "Flower-Pieces," &c., &c., to his Daughter
Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S. Siebenkæs.
A Genuine Thorn Piece.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite--The Counterparts--Dish
Quintette in two Courses--Table-talk--Six Arms and Hands.
CHAPTER II.
Home Fun--Sundry formal Calls--The Newspaper Article--A Love
Quarrel, and a few hard words--Antipathetic ink on the wall--
Friendship of the Satirists--Government of Kuhschnappel.
APPENDIX to CHAPTER II.
Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.
CHAPTER III.
Lenette's Honeymoon--Book Brewing--Schulrath Stiefel--Mr.
Everard--A Day before the Fair--The Red Cow--St. Michael's Fair--
The Beggars' Opera--Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or
the Mannikin of Fashion--Autumn Joys--A New Labyrinth.
CHAPTER IV.
A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre--Letter to that Hair Collector,
the Venner--Self-deceptions--Adam's Marriage Sermon--Shadowing
and Over-shadowing.
End of the Preface and of the First Book.
* * * * *
PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.
PREFACE by the Author of 'Hesperus'.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER V.
The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements--The Importance of a
Bookwriter--Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the subject
of Candle Snuffing--The Pewter Cupboard--Domestic Hardships and
Enjoyments.
CHAPTER VI.
Matrimonial Jars--Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women--More
Pledging--The Mortar and the Snuff-mill--A Scholar's Kiss--On
the Consolations of Humanity.
Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter VI.
The Checked Calico Dress--More Pledges--Christian Neglect of the
Study of Judaism--A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from
the Clouds--The Auction.
CHAPTER VII.
The Shooting-Match--Rosa's Autumnal Campaign--Considerations
concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.
CHAPTER VIII.
Scruples as to Payment of Debts--The Rich Pauper's Sunday
Throne-ceremonial--Artificial Flowers on the Grave--New Thistle
Seedlings of Contention.
First Flower Piece.
The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.
Second Flower piece.
A Dream within a Dream.
* * * * *
BOOK III.
CHAPTER IX.
A Potato War with Women--and with Men--A Walk in December--Tinder
for Jealousy--A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of
checked calico--Rupture with Stiefel--Sad Evening Music.
CHAPTER X.
A Lonely New-Year's Day--The Learned Schalaster--Wooden-leg of
Appeal--Chamber Postal Delivery--The 11th of February, and
Birth-day of the year 1786.
CHAPTER XI.
Leibgeber's Disquisition on Fame--Firmian's "Evening Paper".
CHAPTER XII.
The Flight out of Egypt--The Glories of Travel?--The Unknown
Bayreuth--Baptism in a Storm--Nathalie and the Hermitage--The
most important Conversation in all this Book--An Evening of
Friendship.
CHAPTER XIII.
A Clock of Human Beings--A Cold Shoulder--The Venner.
CHAPTER XIV.
A Lover's Dismissal--Fantaisie--The Child with the Bouquet--The
Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.
First Fruit Piece.
Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of _I_
into _Thou_, _He_, _She_, _Ye_, and _They_; or the Feast of
Kindness of the 20th March.
Postscript by Jean Paul.
* * * * *
BOOK IV.
CHAPTER XV.
Rosa von Meyern--Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest
of all Nights--Letters of Nathalie and Firmian--Table-talk by
Leibgeber.
CHAPTER XVI.
The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures--The Arrival at Home.
CHAPTER XVII.
The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar--Thorn-crowns,
and Thistle-heads of Jealousy.
CHAPTER XVIII.
After-Summer of Marriage--Preparations for Death.
CHAPTER XIX.
The Apparition--Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last
Quarrel--The Raiment of the Children of Israel.
CHAPTER XX.
Apoplexy--The President of the Board of Health--The Notary-Public--
The last Will and Testament--The Knight's Move--Revel, the Morning
Preacher--The Second Apoplectic Attack.
CHAPTER XXI.
Dr. [Oe]lhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking--The Burial Society--
A Death's Head in the Saddle--Frederick II. and his Funeral
Oration.
CHAPTER XXII.
Journey through Fantaisie--Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain--
Berneck--Man-doubling--Gefrees--Exchange of Clothes--Münchberg--
Solo-whistling--Hof--The Stone of Gladness and Double-parting.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Days in Vaduz--Nathalie's Letter--A New Year's Wish--Wilderness
of Destiny and the Heart.
CHAPTER XXIV.
News from Kuhschnappel--Woman's Anticlimax--Opening of the Seventh
Seal.
CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.
The Journey--The Churchyard--The Spectre--The End of the Trouble,
and of the Book.
PREFACE,
WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO
SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE "DOG POST DAYS"[4] AND
THESE PRESENT "FLOWER-PIECES," &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.
On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two
works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went
straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose
law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from
Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see
at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected
with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold--being the
24th of December--the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as
stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-passenger (a "blind" one[5]),
by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other
kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense,
such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady
preface-maker--Oehrmann's daughter and shop-girl--already at work making
oral prefaces to the little books she was selling--Christmas almanacs
of the best of all kinds--duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper
indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver
ages--I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf,
with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or
silvers them over like the winter. I don't blame the poor shop-wench
that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers,
she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and,
although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in
to her father at once.
All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his
counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a
preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was
balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over
already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss
oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency) more than the debit
side. The man's attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of
the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as
he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who,
like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to
whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and
envoyés, namely, commercial travellers--to them, I say, it makes little
difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens
to arrive from.
Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow
mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall
here be made the reader's property.
I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in
general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three
parts--into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public,
just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body,
Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of
scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in
business--that true _corpus callosum_ of the German empire--buys and
uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of _body_), and
deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and
consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class
the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other
only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of
the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in
a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his 'Enumeration of the
Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,'
has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or
theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day
with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of "wizard" and
"witchmaster,"--whose _spiritus rector_ and grand master seems to have
been the devil himself--having got degraded to a name applied to great
and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up
with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable
case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has
recognised official positions--can lecture on his own subjects; but the
poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment--(if he did he would
no longer be "born," he would be "made" by the Imperial Chancery), and
people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it
in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of
expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal
edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court
of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases--and
that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never
_copious_ enough or _condensed_ enough. At the same time, I at once
admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very
much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its
song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny,
jerking water-wagtails.
The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is
composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it
in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages,
where there's nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and
upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.
The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of
consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of
taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost
cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one
or two more--an author has little need to trouble himself about _their_
votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don't read him.
At all events, they don't deserve the dedication with which I, at
the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great
Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I
resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my 'Hesperus,' or the
'Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,' to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it
were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:--
Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served
as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang
the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o'clock. Soon after this, by
scraping and pinching, he _became_ a "pretty rich house" (though he
_kept_ a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a
whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated,
promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal
offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of
Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say,
the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a
watchful corps of _observation_, insisted upon making him their
captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing
but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his
dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of
the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a
title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only _makes_ a
_beginning_ at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with
prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors,
and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any
qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make
his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre's
through magic vapour.
Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more
striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of
portable miniature of it--like itself, he cares only for bread-studies,
and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but
politics--he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his
shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it--the tourmaline only
to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of
both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater
attractive power than either)--he knows no higher thing in the world
than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil
marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the
Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than
the waste-book and the ledger.
* * * * *
"May I be d--d," thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, "if I
can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name
of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it
couldn't possibly know what I meant" it occurred to me; and on account
of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another
plan.
Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her
father's, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me
now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my
presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this
kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)--from
being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time,
I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked
(together with the latter) to stay to supper.
Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of
Germany about my ears--aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially
for the purpose--I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in
plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came,
and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all
my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for
that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was
incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father
to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the
world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive,
was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his
foreign mail days, when it didn't take much to put him to sleep.
On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and
abridge my "45 Dog Post Days" into the space of about the same number
of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration
necessary.
I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in
this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their
lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have
related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly
epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and
papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been
beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her
remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her
manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of
humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried "let the
author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is
sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us." Indeed, had these
gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than
they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a
book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I
think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and
had they then seen, or more properly, nearly _lost_ sight of, that
gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls
and gold are the _softer_ and the more _impressionable_ the _purer_
they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the
heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves,
and the snoring father----
* * * * *
Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and
shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone
on with in a calmer mood.
* * * * *
I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house
would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas
Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some
person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and
tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at
first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he
would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till
grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be
expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest
and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two
stoppages of payment--my opinions on the French War, and the high
prices of everything--that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in
length--that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade,
in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I
had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the "revising
barristers" of and "lodgers of appeals" against the newspaper writers;
that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their
ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail
themselves of these resurrected ones in the next "affaire;" whilst the
soldiers' children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and
then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a
halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again
for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a
beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the
other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an
orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock's orthographical rule,
only to _write_ what you _hear_.
When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to
work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann's cradle. My 'Hesperus' is too
big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these
occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its
petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars--then
introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the _Laws_ of Nature, seeing
that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply--from this point
I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral
science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the
deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted
up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose,
attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke
till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I
would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I
placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest
poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous
occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was
said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and
proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann's soul (his body) the
following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists
among the princes of Germany. "I do not mean as regards the animal
world," I continued slowly and tediously. "Kartesius, as we know, is of
opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently,
man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this
dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this--do not
the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality
of a realm consists in EXTENSION, as Kartesius holds that of matter to
do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does
of matter, that its essentiality consists in SOLIDITY."
He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad
awake as you please, "There are only two of them that can pay their
way--the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of----"
At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the
wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and
set to work printing her brothers' names at full length upon their
shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for
her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had
on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the
night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.
Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my
books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to
settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in
pumping out what follows.
"I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have
never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed
or explicit manner with my two latest _opuscula_, or little works; the
elder of the two is, curiously enough, called 'Dog Post Days,' and the
later 'Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea
to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and
then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a
little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my
fault alone, and nobody else's, if you find you don't quite know what
the first of the two may be _about_--whether you are to suppose it to
be a work on heraldry or on insects--or a dictionary of some particular
dialect--or an ancient codex--or a Lexicon Homericum--or a collection
of inaugural disputations--or a ready reckoner--or an epic poem--or a
volume of funeral sermons. It really _is_ nothing but an interesting
story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I
should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and
particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that
one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do
not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and
hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit
that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's favour that
there are parts of it to be found--I hope not very many--in which there
are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery
styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no
reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a
businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case),
though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at
imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which
so often _seem_ as if they really must have been written by the old
_artless_ knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the
heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)--that my attempts, I
say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that
amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I
might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as
many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do
not offend the ears of the great--but only those of the chaste--are not
considered the most objectionable."
I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which
enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to
a quite different topic, saying, "it is probably the safest way of all,
to have improper books deposited in _public_ libraries, where the
librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners
and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from
being read than an edict of the censorship." But Jacobus would speak
out his thought, "Pauline, don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin
hasn't paid her fine yet."
It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to
within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw
his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping
powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to
weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather
undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five
minutes' time, than a man of business in as many hours.
Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had
accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one
the following letters from her letterbox: "STORY"--i. e. she wanted to
be told the "Dog Post Days" that evening.
So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: "The fact
is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting
letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my
'Post Days' may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons'
names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their
paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting
on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my
manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to
the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way
of a comforting thought was this very natural one, 'Devil make a better
of it all!' Only he's just the very last person to _do it_. For, good
heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments
of universal world history are only _being tuned_ in the orchestra
before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and
squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the
tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much
better than the opera itself)--in such an age, when it is so hard to
tell the coward from the brave man--him who lets everything go as it
pleases from him who strives to do something great and good--those who
are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit,
just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the
dead ones--in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author,
one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that,
after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue,
love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun,
he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures
and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until
they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of
the pictures _have_ fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth,
then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to
the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are
_incapable of business_ can work for the press."
"There's work, and there's work," the merchant, wide awake, struck in;
"it all depends---- Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn't much
better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging--not
meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down
book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of
books--arithmetic books, and so on."
The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me,
because _my_ business was only the making of books, though in old days
I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary
depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many
people take of the _convenances_ of society; but I think anyone on
earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to
be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the
fellow's impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five
senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately
and without abridgment, my "extra leaflets" from my 'Hesperus.'
This, of course, was bound to put him to death--sleep, I mean.
And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the
author--then commenced our feast of unleavened bread--then I could sit
down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the
public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing
sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and
besieged by sermons--which cannot refresh itself at so much as a
birthday ball, were it only the superintendent's and his wife's, nor
with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a
beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin
honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of
some mesh in the nun's veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let
her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern
land--to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes--to lift her
beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender
heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery--to set it
free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of
poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer
growth than those of the country round.
I had just finished by one o'clock. I had taken only three hours to the
three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the "extra
leaves." "If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the
Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that's not
purely historical," I said, and sacrificed my most precious
digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is
not quite the proper soil.
Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o'clock it
was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby
depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week,
on New Year's Eve.
My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening,
because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my
"Flower-pieces"--this very book.
I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the
evening exactly as they occurred.
I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the
red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to
the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I
attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and
wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters
which I had--NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to
the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau
on the New Year's Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to
lay before my dear Pauline some more _Paulina_, namely these sketches,
because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her
counter, these wouldn't be among them--I consider that no editor who
has any principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my
_having_ duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just
listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent
soul-flower the FLOWER-PIECES, two dreams made of flowers put together
mosaic-fashion--next the Thorn-pieces,[6] from which I had to break
away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a
mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up
last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe
fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling
ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I
meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would
have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not
know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this
flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from
mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the
polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little
to do.
But near as it was to the time for wishing new year's wishes, the old
year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.
Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came
in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to
sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable
remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things
about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to
apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere
pasquinade into the nobler satire: "I always picture lawyers and
clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of
engine for quenching money thirst--the one row, the clients, always
passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row
standing and handing each other buckets or purses full," said I.
I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the
great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own--for he is a
small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on
him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say
to the following ideas.
"The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a
flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon
rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of _export_
trade only; the attic salt _they_ have a taste for, is that which
BENKELSZOON used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided
Erasmus, in consideration of _his_ salt (of a better quality), with a
statue (he never _ate_ salt, by the way), yet I think this was
excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to
the fish-curer in question. Even CAMPE, who by no means classes the
inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the
constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I
say that the German is really being made something of at the present
day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded
fellow--a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful
follies, who knows _edible_ from _cogitable_ matter (when he sees it),
and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the
printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important)
from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens
who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of
any poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's own
heart-strings--and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to
exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any printing except
calico-printing."
Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and
had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed
that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all
this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and
he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he
was dead.[8]
Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden
change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened,
speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and
further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual _diminuendo_ of
my tone, as follows:--"And of such a public as this, I quite expect
that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above
altar-pieces,[9] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of
any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all
will be, 'is the fellow _solvent_?' And further, my beloved listener (I
continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the
sleeper by any change in the _kind_ of sound), it is to be hoped and
expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for
your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been
committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this
evening, if _he_ (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long
enough."
I commenced, accordingly, as follows:--
P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to
have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the
book itself, printed over again in the _preface_! At the end of book
the first, however, I shall give the continuation and conclusion of
this preface, and of the New Year's Eve, and shall then go on with the
second book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair.
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
HOF, _7th November_, 1796.
WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE
OF
F. S. SIEBENKÆS,
PARISH ADVOCATE IN THE ROYAL BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
* * *
A GENUINE THORN PIECE.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE--THE COUNTERPARTS--DISH
QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES--TABLE-TALK--SIX ARMS AND HANDS.
Siebenkæs, parish advocate[10] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel,
had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife
that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little
before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going
to church for the wedding.
The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg,
had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her
wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.
She was an Augspurger by birth--only daughter of the deceased
Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council--and she lived in the
Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many
drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by
her own work, not on other people's, as penisoned court-ladies'-maids
do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in
her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit
in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on;
and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days' notice, on
a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of
them.
All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more
than once) that it was the devil who invented _seeking_, and his
grandmother who devised _waiting_. At length, while it was still pretty
early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an
epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady "could
not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her
wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of
Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates."
Siebenkæs's butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey
cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this
idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate
burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the
feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits
of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with
unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling
whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more
advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on
the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather's leather
arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his
chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar
considers the mere _arranging_ of his books and papers to _be_ a
purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish
advocate, saying further, "orderliness is, properly defined, nothing
but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty
years in the _old_ place, let that place be where it will."
Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red
dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also
of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors
of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had
all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an
excellent arrangement, inasmuch as--most of the people of the house
being working-men--their play Monday and his fell together; for it was
only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used
my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the
poor (a fit candidate for his _own_ services in that capacity). But I
have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero's
guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any
hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200
Rhenish guldens (_i.e_. 100_l_.), to say nothing of the interest. Only,
unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn
of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that
metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial
plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense,
tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who
acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is
electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be
passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one
occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar's
scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious
times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented)
himself in going on to say, "It is easier to bear poverty like
Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is
easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a
man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves
alone." Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts,
and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian
for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was
his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and
overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her
reception (for such he considered his 100_l_. with the accumulated
interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he
was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what
little he _could_ scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from
hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little
about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. "I'll be handed," he
had long ago said, "if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a
year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon,
to whom they sign away their souls--often their child--that the evil
one may give them money and eatables."
This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of
winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense).
Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of
the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a
scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of
her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded,
while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.
"Your worthy intended," he said, "is coming directly. She is getting
ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and
begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true
woman, in Solomon's sense of the term, and I congratulate you most
heartily."
"The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?--I can conduct you to him
myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment," said
the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up:
but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in
the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the
hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him
with a hesitating step into the advocate's room. She held out her right
hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom,
and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes,
mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the
prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while
the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial
flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to
her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet--there being barely
time to get one's hair done and be married--and laid her garland, which
she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon
the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered
for the ceremony (as a person's of quality ought to be) by the
landlord, thus conveniently at hand.
Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for
everyone whom she's not going to many, a poor meagre piece of
shewbread--and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour,
namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose
life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress,
overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with
others like them, fate is soon to pluck away--and with anxious pious
eyes overflowing on her mother's heart for the last and loveliest time;
this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the
scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single
meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other
children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. "Thou heart,
beating high with happiness," I think then, "not always wilt thou throb
thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour
out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the
chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own
heel." And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by
the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, "Do not so begrudge
the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what
you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of
marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no
one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if
ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has
chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal
dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has
lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure
it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy
and brightness now?"
I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into
the "remote key" of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed
to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette's myrtle
wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to
touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all
alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more
vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young
delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished
handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking
round her to see which way she was going to be led by them----
I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was
quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he
gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the
flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful
how he carried about that heart of his--so full to the brim of the
potion of love, and tears of gladness--lest it should run over in the
presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his
shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong
feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always
thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their
emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom
he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day
was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only
his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this
condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn't masking himself
sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber's mate, and
commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger
measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as
favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she
didn't think her room "nicely situated," and saying, "I can see into
the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink
bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their
value, and very handsome they are, don't you think so? My good old
grandfather's chair here, though" (he had sat down in it, and laid his
lean arms on the chair's stuffed ones), "does, I think, take the
precedence in the grandfather dance:[11] 'how they so softly rest,' arm
upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but
the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to
understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both
do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin
'Meditations' is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though,
is the place--better still than this room; there are pots, all
ranged side by side--and all sorts of things--the hare-skinner and the
hare-spit--my father used to shoot the hares for these."
The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she
had heard the greater part of the story of the 100_l_. (with interest)
in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I
shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen
to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to
her.
It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be
informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat,
and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress
cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own
satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair
Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market
to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous
occasion, "We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a
moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for
lost flatteries."
The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched
the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.
I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps;
and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown),
especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who,
according to Swedenborg's vision, always merge into one angel--although
on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and
that a fallen one--the husband (who is the head of the wife)
representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I
would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all
the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and
puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.
For there appears there, looking down at us--and we all looking up at
it--Siebenkæs's _spirit_, as the popular expression has it, _i.e_. his
body, as it _ought_ to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he
might turn pale, and think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only
turns red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, having
many years ago vowed to travel any distance to his marriage, solely
that he might laugh at him for twelve hours' time.
There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar
natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish
nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all
pettiness and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation
with dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this
lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to the voice of the
multitude, but not to that of honour; these are but some of the first
at hand of the similarities which made of these two but one soul doing
duty in two bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers in
their studies, having for nurses the same branches of knowledge,
including the Law herself, I do not reckon among their chief
resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of study
becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not even
the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual
attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber
towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a
street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic
harshnesses). But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed
alike, these two men's souls had put on just the same frock-coat and
morning costume of life; I mean, two bodies of identical fashion,
colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both had the same flash of
the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the same tallness, leanness,
and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is
commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it when some prince or
great person casts a corporeal reflection.
For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight
limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from
Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and
dissolved away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe
its last above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left
ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a
turned-up comet's tail, of an ass's ear in short. Partly from
friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the scenes of
absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise to in
every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which
existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian
and surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each
wanted to be the other's namesake, till at length they settled the
difference by _exchanging_ names, thus following the example of the
natives of Otaheite, among whom the lovers exchange names as well as
hearts.
As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his
worthy name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy
name in exchange, I can't do anything to alter this in my chapters. I
must go on calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the
beginning, and the other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary
for any reviewer to point out to me that the more comic name of
Siebenkæs would have been better suited to this more humoristic
newcomer, with whom, however, the world shall yet be better acquainted
than I am myself.
When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church,
their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on
laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm
with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being
exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of
scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view
of the bride's profile. This cutting out of likenesses he generally
gave out as being his cookshop and bakery upon his perpetual
journeyings; and as it appears that this strange man does not choose to
disclose upon what eminences the waters gather which well up for him
down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my own belief in)
a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting--"In the process
of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the
bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white;
but in clipping _black_ paper, whether profiles or white mourning
letters with black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is
versed in the liberal art of painting his fellow Christian blacker than
he is--with more members than one--the tongue for instance can do it to
some extent--then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man's
bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), till her arm is
half crippled."
While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down
and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony
was over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a
separation of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy
speech:--
"Good morning, Siebenkæs."
They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed;
and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as
he did to-day,--
"Good morning, Leibgeber."
The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an
easy matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an
impossibility to the tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be
to the humorous sides of matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at
the sight of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new
labyrinth of our subterranean existence.
I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I
am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at
Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact
copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have
inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion
of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that
it is neither in my power nor in my pen's to _half_ portray, and that
in a feeble style, how the guests--there were almost as many there as
there were chairs--enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover,
there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom's
guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very
sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive
Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by
his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the
forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be
filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not
even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work
but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted
under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day
before the closing of the gate; how not only was there _one_ course
served up, but a second, a "Doppelgänger." To anyone, indeed, who has
dined at great men's tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if
there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws
of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs
(the hairdresser's wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided
for the first course.
1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could
enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the
crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre
had in the convent--that is to say, merely the tail.
2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of
meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.
3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the
butcher's shop, _sweetly_ treated.
4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed
the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.
5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had
sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.
I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly
sketching for them a little "cookery-piece" of the second course.
1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of
cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four
syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the
table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as
antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in
the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field
with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy's fire, more
fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic
figure consisted of a calf's tongue, which was black, not from arguing,
but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the
stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was
on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world
one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the
three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter;
these three glorified bodies, which, like "the three children," had
come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls,
were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests,
with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird
Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.
This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards
the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly
were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to
which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country
require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every
year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century,
a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:--"This day
was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I
have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25_s_.). That's what I
_call_ banquetting!" But what would the Saxon treasurer have written?
how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in
my very first chapter that a poor's advocate had gone and spent three
gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!
As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which
welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the
guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the
company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the
privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had
been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the
imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no
drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the
right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in
cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath
alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to
himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events,
could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and
empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;--joking with them, and
actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More
than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the
newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry
critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with
his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he
made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of
his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which _he_ had made on a
similar occasion.
Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles
of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in
the lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end
without accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in
the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of
conversation that the only thing there generally is not enough of, is
beer. "Oh!" he went on, "if everyone of our condition would but think
of it, he would but envy those of a lower; how accurately, in a
figurative sense too, does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen
keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden
house is easier warmed than a stone one--and the stone one again
doesn't get cool so soon as the wooden in summer--or as coarse brown
flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors
tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who
wear diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there
who get their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street
sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones,
gathered by himself as a substitute for fir-fuel" (here the fuel
economising company thought vividly of their own case), "is often quite
as well off on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in
sugar and eat them."
"Friend Parish Advocate," said Leibgeber, "there you hit it! In the
tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow,
the kick, the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with
the reckoning. The reverse is the case in the palace; in a 'palais' for
the 'palais' everybody's enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same
instant; just as the little Aphides on the leaves all lift up their
tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same moment,[12] in the
palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and sociability.
Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up
ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and
administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a
dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it
to operate by licking it slowly off."
And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has
reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become
greater. Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the
privilege of drink, and of the special inquisition, to say "Thou" to
one another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath
was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and
smiled in a seductive manner, as elderly maiden ladies do in the
presence of elderly single gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at
home a couple of real Horatian bottles of champagne. "Not sparkling
then, I'm sure?" Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The Schulrath, who
thought the best kind of champagne exactly the worst, replied with some
self-consciousness, "If it isn't sparkling, well and good, I swear I'll
drink every drop of it myself." The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking
the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain, removed the
cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.
What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life,
namely wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the
very topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower
out of the watering pot of these said bottles--in three minutes they
will begin to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver
foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and
glow while fair air-castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many
tinted were the floating bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath
Stiefel's ideas of all categories, his simple as well as his compound
ideas, his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be
forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except on the
subject of Lenette's perfections, and that he told Leibgeber in
confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed, "the tenth
Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus--for it was clear who
had got _her_ already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation
or other of hers." During the whole journey, he said, he had preached
from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the
subject of the blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in
the brightest colours, and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he
quite longed to enter into it himself: and the bridegroom would have
thanked him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him in
return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, and happy in all
she did that day, and particularly that evening; and what became her
best of all was that on such a high day as this, she waited upon others
more than she let herself be waited upon--that she put on a light
every-day dress--that even at this advanced stage of her own education
she took private lessons in cookery and household matters from her
female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects--and that
she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired
state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed
his left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that
of its plush sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle
before the whole company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole;
somewhat like a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at
arm's length to a high branch and snipping off the whole concern by a
slight movement of his hand at the bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out
to give him a profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away,
he even made an attempt (but this was the only one of his ventures
which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.
At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down
like their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into
the night. The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last
there was only one guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest),
and one long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the loud
clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself away into silence,
and just one or two, left alone, sit quietly, often sadly, listening to
the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath
struck the last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and departed;
but he would not for a moment suffer that those fingers, which, in
spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should be clasped
about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him
downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife,
for the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.
Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel,
dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee
reach even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.
The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied,
that his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing
energetic, active effort; not a smooth, regular, "handsome" one: and
as, moreover, he always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he
supposed it would strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was
that, although as an every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and
tongues of a whole street (not even taking the pains mentally to snap
his fingers at them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of
dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage to kiss his
Leibgeber--let alone Lenette. And now he pressed her hand more closely,
and in a dauntless manner turned his face to hers (for, you see, they
were in the dark, and he couldn't see her); and he wished the staircase
had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber might be a
long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden there _danced_ (so
to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and--then all the
flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For
Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride's duty to
give this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the
courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the
fire wherewith love, wine and joy had endowed him; but--so strange is
her sex--she turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her
cheek. And there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long
kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable
sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette's cheeks,
and thence into her trembling heart. She leant her face further away;
but in her beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her.
He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale
powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom--that butterfly-dust
which the very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon
our fingers (and hence it was a good idea of Pitt's to put a tax on
powder in 1795)--told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and
the bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two friends
looked for some time at each other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette
looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, "Hem! Hem!" twice over, and at
length, in his perplexity, remarked, "We've had a delightful evening!"
He took up a position behind the bridegroom's chair, to be out of
sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right
heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself no longer; he
stood up, resigned the bride's hand, and the two friends, at last,
after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment
of their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with
Heaven all around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would
fain have widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his
bride and his friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took
each one side of him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens
opened in glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God,
love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which hangs on all our
joy-flowers, here below.
In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and
feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to
look into each other's tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in
silence, without a word of parting or good night.
CHAPTER II.
HOME FUN--SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS--THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE--A LOVE
QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS--ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL--
FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS--GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the
material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is
as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly
delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the
Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in
the hands of his diligent house goddess--who put a cap on to her
cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself--the silver
ingots from his guardian's coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her
palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn't
do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that
is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. "I can give you no
notion, old Leibgeber," said Siebenkæs, "what a joy I feel in looking
forward to how this will delight my wife. I'm sure, to give her
pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child
has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she
_will_ consider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she
finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see
as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old
boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my
silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over--there
shall be a good half-florin's worth of beer in every room in the house.
Look here! why shouldn't the dove, or call him the sparrow, of _my_
hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort
does wine at a coronation?" Leibgeber answered, "The reason he can't
is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine
(of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins--the feathers, the wool,
and the hair which eagles always eject."
It would be of no use whatever--because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers
would correct my statement in their local paper, the 'Imperial
News'--if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very
much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of
their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as
they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to
scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner
minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.
Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of
Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what
Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of
deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was
to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that
he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a
syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company
of the "Relaxation" as the club was called. "This," he said, "was what
he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were
clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in
any rational manner at night in one's ordinary quiet bed was a thing
which _he_, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of
the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework
trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in
and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear
one's self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of
this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas
establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at
once--the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the
political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes
nothing but an _ultima_, perhaps, or sometimes only an _antepenultima_;
this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious
discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in
all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout--your barometer becomes
completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which
is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm."
One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a
stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also
recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would
look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say,
"Many thanks for this refreshing rest."
However, I have little to do with Leibgeber's waking or with his
sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence,
seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is
anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just
established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to
give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should
go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had
long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to
his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.
To mention but one prank--was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that,
when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the
streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows
of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and
just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with
their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound "Saufinder"
(he couldn't live without a big dog) look out of window with a
fashionable lady's night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a
soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs's part, that he took lemons and bit
into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their
teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these
questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in
full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing
position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the
same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the
opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to
wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous
interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end
aimed at by both the advocates?
But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still
half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty
or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university
youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur,
Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment
of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of
manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse
has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never
develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all
fours.
Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days--not wholly in a
disorderly manner--in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on
which of course there was nothing but the words, "Mr. Firmian
Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor's Advocate, and his wife, _née_ Engelkraut;
with compliments."--with these papers, and with the lady, they were
both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get
down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no
means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where
people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren,
Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial
and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else,
conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for
the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low
comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the
borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs's
zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place,
in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it
was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather
to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it
by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to
it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a
member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his
love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for
Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such
matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his
travels.
So they drove about the town on the Saturday--and where anybody in the
shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers' tickets
and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it
is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier
with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier
maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The
cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the
directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the
greater and lesser council--to the seventy members of the greater, and
the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the
treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say,
tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members--these
constituting the said lesser council--each received his card. After
which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government
officials in the various chambers and offices with _their_ cards, such
as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of
Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat
Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a
very nice old man.
I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have
drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial
borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town,
though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and
statistical world. However, I can't possibly pull up here in the full
gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it,
when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.
The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when
Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs's marriage to
the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre,
barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the
Heimlicher's wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of
the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she
uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)--
"My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he's away
from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13] he is tutor and
guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You
had better be off as fast as you like; you've got hold of the wrong man
here."
"I quite think we have, myself," said Leibgeber.
Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier
with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she
was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them:
and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, "You're quite
sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any
venomous 'objections' which the guardian might make to paying up your
money, on account of your changing your name?" he assured him, that
before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his
guardian's opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him
when they got home.
But when they did get home, Von Blaise's letter was nowhere to be
found--it wasn't in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college
note-books, nor even among the wastepaper--in fact, there was nothing
of the kind.
"But what a donkey I am to bother about it!" cried Siebenkæs, "what do
I require it for, at all?"
Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers,
suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted
tone of voice, "Come out, old boy, and let's have a run in the fields."
When they got there, he put into his hands the 'Schaffhausen News,' the
'Swabian Mercury,' the 'Stuttgart Times,' and the 'Erlangen Gazette,'
and said, "These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of
scoundrel you have for a guardian."
In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:--
"Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to
the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been
heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the
instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and
summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months
from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby
constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the
third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of
this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over
the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said
Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian; _which failing_, that,
as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts,
that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall
be taken _pro mortuo_), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may
be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid
Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th
August, 1785.
"Inheritance Office of the free Imperial
Borough of Kuhschnappel."
It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council
referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where
thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly
prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the
advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its
concluding lines, his soul's brother took hold of his hand, and cried,
"Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names
with you."
"You?--oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that
letter," he said, and they made another search all over the house, in
every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber
hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick
paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told
unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant,
nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe.
However, there was nothing _in_ this letter, except Siebenkæs's name in
Siebenkæs's own writing--not another word, outside or inside. Quite
natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his
pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other
people's as well, with flourishes about them.
The letter _had_ once been written in the inside, but, to save an
incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written
his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes
from the paper of itself, and leaves it, _in integrum_, white as it was
before it was written on.
I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better
classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory
notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the
receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a
reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a
piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court--grind the
scrapings finer still on a piece of marble--moisten this fine cloth
dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his
promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has
evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it
in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were,
through the blackness of the ink.
But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and
presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch
as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a
security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time
to the sun.
Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink
with the _sympathetic_ ink (likewise possessing the property of turning
pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in
both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal
persons; the latter however, has a _red_ tint. A treaty of peace of
three years' standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of
life, because the _red_ ink--the _encaustum_, with which formerly no
one but the Roman emperors might write--is too apt to turn _pale_,
unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the
cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in
its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not
always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and
etched into the territory afresh with good instruments--the so-called
"instruments of peace"--at the point of the bayonet.
The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first
thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the
Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher
during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however.
They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he
himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole
blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made
one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity
of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that
institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his
unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service
of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two
advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his
admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to
eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to
spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them,
because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins
of Sabbath breaking, such as working on _their own_ account, at sewing,
mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the
Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as
actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have
their rehearsals on that day.
However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell
at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church's
vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the
pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit's-blue _poisonous_ flowers, which
grow pyramidally to man's height.[14] People like Von Blaise, not only
ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as
they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of
making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take
possession of the hills, and particularly the _gallows-hills_. The
Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard
does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the
wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which
respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam's dragon
kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage
to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not
as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop
down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of
Olives, be sure that he's going to build an oil mill on it; and if he
weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he's either going a-fishing in
it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the
object of luring to him the _ignes-fatui_ of sins; he kneels, but only
as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he
opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a
ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot
Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously
together, but does it as the machines called "maidens" did, only to cut
people to pieces.
At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some
people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as
thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o'clock on the Sunday evening they
walked, _sans façon_, into Von Blaise's house. Everything was still and
empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the
half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All
they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book
lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on
which were Miller's 'Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,' and Schlichthoher's
'Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.' They
pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher
all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under
his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had
stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which
occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with
the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had
partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their
eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when
their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels
are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the
oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes
closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him
gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the
devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude
of prayer till 10 o'clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von
Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan
and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill "Amen,"
and he would put something on to his bald head again.
This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on
the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake
the city's father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and
saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he
took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from
off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had
fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to
present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names.
He likewise called him his "kind cousin and guardian." Leibgeber, more
angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the
wrong had not been done to _him_, fired into the Heimlicher's ears,
from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the
inquiries, "Which of us two is it that your worship has given out _pro
mortuo_, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the
ghosts of _two_ of us here both together." Blaise turned with a lofty
air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, "If you have not changed
your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe _you_ are the
gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several
previous occasions. Or was it _you_, sir?" he said to Leibgeber, who
shook like one possessed. "Well," he continued in a more pleasant tone,
"I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed,
until now, that you were the person who left this for the university
ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the
guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my
mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which,
_præter propter_, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in
many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a
mole beside his ear."
"The infernal mole," interrupted Leibgeber, "was obliterated by means
of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass's ear,
and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a
relative along with it."
"That may be," said the guardian coldly, "You must prove to me, Herr
Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the
inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your
family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably
one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last
week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of
Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question
with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance),
and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I
should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property
out of my hands. What would you do--they very properly said--what
answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to
appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It
would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business
of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law
does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and
from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[15]--it
would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second
time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my
capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the
validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer,
know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it
no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not
as a man, but as a guardian--it would probably be the best course to
let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance
Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr.
Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible" (he ended more smilingly, and
laying his hand on the other's shoulder) "to see that which I hope may
prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber,
properly established by legal proof."
"Then," said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of
scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face,
"is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to--to
_himself_, that is to say, to your worship's ward, to be taken as
proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case of
_comparatio literarum_ would prove?"
"Oh, of course," said Blasius, "something, certainly, but not
everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham
Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now, _you_ should be my cousin
yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!"
Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice,
"So I am, my dearest guardian--it was all done to try you--I hope you
will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification."
"All very well," answered Blasius, more inflatedly, "but your own
changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal
investigation."
This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by
the hand, as much as to say, "Pray be patient," and inquired in a voice
which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, "Did you never
write to me when I was in Leipzig?"--"If you are my ward, I certainly
did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in
some other way."
Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, "Have you no recollection at
all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest
risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?"
"This is really quite ludicrous," answered Blaise, "in that case there
could be no question about the matter!"
Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as
if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the
pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and
thundered out, "You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you
smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I'll
throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet--if you lift a
finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say
you never received any letter on the subject, do you?"
"I had rather say nothing," whispered Blasius, "evidence given under
coercion is valueless."
Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber
said to the dog, "Mordax! hooy, Sau.," took the glass periwig from the
head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it,
and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), "Screw him down
yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want
to say one or two pretty things to him--don't let him say 'Pap!'--Herr
Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making
use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an
improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a
robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the
kind--for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a
human being's.[16] The epithets which I here make use of, such as
scoundrel--Judas--gallows-bird" (at each word he struck the glass
turban like a cymbal against his other hand), "skunk, leech,
horse-leech--nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not
constitute libel, firstly because, according to 'L. § de injur.,' the
grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here--and
we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own
rights--see 'Leyser.'[17] Indeed, according to Quistorp's 'Penal Code,'
we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without _animus
injurandi_, provided that he has not been already tried and punished
for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished,
you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the
Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]--rather a different sort of man to you, it's
to be hoped--and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can
lay hold of you--but I've got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!"
The dog looked up at this word of command.
"Let him go, now," Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate
sinner.
"In a moment; but don't you put me in a fury, please," said Leibgeber,
letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his
scissors and black paper, "I want to be quite calm while I clip out a
likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap
of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a _gage
d'amour_. I want to carry this _ecce homunculus_ about with me half
over the world, and say to everybody, 'Hit it, bang away at it well;
blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed
Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I
had not been far too strong.'
"I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a
good portrait, "to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word
of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the
one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to
him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as
good friends as ever again."
Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder--whom he
had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his
finger--as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last
occasion of his being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he
displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and
small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly
ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who
does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he
had brought with him a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made
from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid
dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first
and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is
invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when
it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this
ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest
to the stove, or Themis.
"The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly
against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not
absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who
is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.
"THEMIS."
Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley's green
composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that
next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by
the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a
sudden shoot lustily forth.
So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his
appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his
observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and
even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it
mightn't be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, "Don't pull
such a long face about it--I shall keep flying backwards and forwards
to you, of course. Come through the gate with me--I must get across the
frontier of this country; let's run, and get on to royal territory
before six minutes are over our heads."
When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like
ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood
open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of
nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and
closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze
moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn
stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one
constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits,
seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness.
The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends' hearts.
Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, "God be thanked!
this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night
seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and
softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself
growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting."
"If it only hadn't all been on my account, old Henry," said Siebenkæs,
"your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner."
"Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people's faces as I
am," said Leibgeber, "you would have been in a greater rage if you had
been in my place. One can bear injustice to one's self--particularly
when one has as good a temper as I have--but not to a friend. And
unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and
blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a
general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger--or rather
when I have got on to _his_ back--I always spur the brute nearly to
death, till he falls down, so that I mayn't have to mount him again for
the next three months. However, I have poured _you_ out a nice basin of
black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand."
Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something
about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the
discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly
as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him,
"My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress
of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant
that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious
flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall
bring my action to-morrow."
They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of
parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came
to a column which had been erected by the Princess of ---- on the spot
where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from
the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite
significance to-night, Leibgeber said, "Now, right about face--march!
Your wife is getting anxious--it's past eleven o'clock. There, you
see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress,
the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my
crop--other people's faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool's face
into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for
the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are
pretty well out of date. By the by." he added, hastily, "promise me on
your word of honour to do me one little favour."
Siebenkæs instantly did so. "Don't send my deposit after me[19]--a
plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man," he
blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the
little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered
and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable.
When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his
head low towards the ground, and--loosened his garters.
"Couldn't you have done that up here?" cried Siebenkæs, and went down
to him, and said, "We'll go as far as the gallows hill together." The
sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their
emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons
and spices. As the _first_ parting had caused their eyes to overflow,
they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.
"Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?" said
Siebenkæs. "If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the
master of the house, as the superstition runs," said Leibgeber, "I
shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive
and kicking." At last they stopped at the market house, beside the
place of execution. "Just up to the top," said Siebenkæs, "no further."
When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy
life--and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar
where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought,
in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning
tears which women who had killed their children[21] (and were
themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall
upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of
blood--and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad
earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over
all its streams--he took his friend's hand, and, looking to the free
starry heaven, said, "The mists of our life on earth _must_ be resolved
into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into
suns. Henry, don't you yet believe in the soul's immortality?"--"It
will _not_ do yet, I can _not_," Leibgeber replied. "Blasius, now,
hardly deserves to live _once_, let alone twice or several times. I
sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other world
had been _painted on_ to this, just to finish it off and make it
complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in
fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal
subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But
at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which
priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about
churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed.
Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl
about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at
last."
His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, "We do
_not_ go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is
no parting. By my soul! we do _not_ go out. Farewell, farewell."
And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through
the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye,
that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on
Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do
weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest
on his wife's untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring
it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the
thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him--and of his
friend's night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at
without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for
his friend that his tears flowed fast.
Oh ye two friends--thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who
art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back
upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me--the same
which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a
lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their
letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine
was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the
hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to
the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could
work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long
sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits
full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.
So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar
kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs.
We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about
their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained
and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells
forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night
all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.
These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of
university life, at once saw straight through each other's breasts into
each other's hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite
poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber's firmness and
power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and
laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham
scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his
pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live
without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own.
On which account the poor's advocate used to tell him, ten times over,
the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.
The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a
eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander,
suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in
silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, "The speechless
heart has spoken."
The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his
'Messiah' to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving
among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old
teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock's) name. To
which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs
would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give
them three readings apiece from his 'Messiah,' rewarding each with a
gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look
to see Leibgeber's foaming and stamping at a person's thus worshipping
himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.
What Leibgeber, on the other hand,--more like the Morlacks, who, as
Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express
both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends
betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar--chiefly delighted in
and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch
which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism
which scorned this world's absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily
enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him
completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But
it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.
GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free
imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a
namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian
towns which takes its seat on Swabia's town-bench of thirty-one towns.
Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of
imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of
freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household
goddess; and according to whose "election of grace" it is that poor
sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to
the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the
Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as
Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the
difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in
postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than
that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed,
imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the
combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were
stolen silver plate with the owner's name still unobliterated--or as
though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which
indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against
their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.
The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to
have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no
great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a
larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or
supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of
life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief
magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only
that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern
has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners,
subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and
Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are
clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.
To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these
two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the
same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the
people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more
perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be
found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of
the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A
short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is
now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working
classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could
meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by
deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns
that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an
inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came
from the tap _nearer the top_ proved sour. However, it is impossible
for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too
prevalent error respecting large towns.
The Behemoths and Condors among towns--Petersburg, London,
Vienna--might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty
and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by
this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes
two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of
equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the
neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it _ejects_
(its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears
the country in the first place of villages, and next of country
towns--which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of
capital cities--inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions
year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with
the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages
into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long,
constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the
villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs.
Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between
the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with
a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of
agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots
in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the
agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no
state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than
cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of
the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means
of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or
by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In
a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a
town like a lump of rubble,--or converted into a stave of the great tun
of Heidelberg in this manner--any country people that might be still to
the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the
villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming
reefs or atolls of a town.
When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt,
been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile
of all classes, at heart, to equality--have next to be attacked and, if
possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a
matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or
two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good
beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however--could
we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable
opponents of equality--the peasants, and the people of the smaller
towns--should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural
races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be
extinct--ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an
equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it
was merely a _plebeian_ one. There would be an absolute equality if
pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession
of _one_ patent of nobility, and of real authentic _ancestors_. In
Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times)
without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing
would be as it was in somewhat _later_ times than those just alluded
to, _all_ capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking
up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a
lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but
a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor
consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a
single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a
clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone
who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher
nobility are.
It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently
rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the
nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to
Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to
expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town
occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into
portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the
surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals
bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants;
what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all
England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings,
and supplies of, alone and unassisted--to say nothing of Scotland and
Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the
number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced,
starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the
town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to
execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the
surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in _precipitating_
the citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the
clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not
successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to
blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon
the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true,
grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered,
in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If
there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic
cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and
levyings of contributions--(which none but plebeian authors term
"flaying" and "pulling the hide over the ears"),--and, the bark being
off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process
of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply
purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the
Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions
of men "cash down," on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a
much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with
modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people,
can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the
clever manner in which many German states have, by _energetic_
treatment, _determined_ their population, as morbid matter, in a
_downward_ direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down
to the United States of America, which are situated straight _below_
them.
Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of
other towns. I admit, as Nicolai's assertion, that of the 60,000 which
Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at
the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to
one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any
moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the
borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as
burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the
former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live
than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free
inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome--in the West
Indies there were of course--more slaves than free men, for which
reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive
dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble
landlords, although the latter _ought_, one would think, to be in the
majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while
aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of
princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a
digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I
should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects
Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with,
many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of
sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in
her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace--in the tax she
levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but
that of home growth, to exclude _thought_ and other (in an
ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort--and even in her "green
market," or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why
the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and
defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss
have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and
stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the
cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors
than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, "Nobody at home."
(Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel
continues to maintain its title of _imperial market_ town, like a
secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws
against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its
blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does,
which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps
constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther
threw at the devil.)
CHAPTER III.
LENETTE'S HONEYMOON--BOOK BREWING--SCHULRATH STIEFEL--MR. EVERARD--
A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR--THE RED COW--ST. MICHAEL'S FAIR--THE
BEGGARS' OPERA--DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE
MANNIKIN OF FASHION--AUTUMN JOYS--A NEW LABYRINTH.
The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our
common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning
coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black
shoe-buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his
happiness and his capital.
Heavens! how _can_ the world make such an exceedingly bad shot as that?
The advocate was not even in _quarter_ mourning, let alone half; he was
in as good spirits as if he had this third chapter before him, and were
just beginning it, as I am.
The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint against his
guardian, Blaise (enlivening it with sundry satirical touches, which
nobody but himself understood), and laid it before the Inheritance
Office. When we are in a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we
can but _do something or other_. Let fortune bluster in our faces with
ever so harsh and frosty an autumn wind--as long as it does not break
the fore joint of our wing (as in the case of the swans), our very
fluttering, though it may not transport us into a warmer climate, will
at all events have the effect of warming us a little. From motives of
kindness, Siebenkæs kept his wife in ignorance of the delay in the
settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old story of the
change of names; he thought there was very little likelihood of a
struggling advocate's wife ever having an opportunity of looking over a
patrician's shoulder into his family hand at cards.
And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden plunge from out his
hermit's holy-week of single blessedness, into the full honeymoon of
double blessedness wish for besides? Not until now had he been able to
hold his Lenette in both his arms rightly--hitherto his friend, always
fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been held fast with his
_left_ arm; but now, she was able to stretch herself out far more
comfortably in the chambers of his heart. And the bashful wife did this
as much as she dared. She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she
was almost glad not to have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the
table and glaring out in that terrible way of his. Whether she
experienced a similar relief at the absence of his wild master, she
could not be brought to say. To the advocate she felt a good deal like
a daughter, and her great tall father could never have enough of her
quaint little ways. That, when he went out, she used to look after him
as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the way in
which she used to run out after him with a brush, when she noticed from
the window that there was such a quantity of street paving sticking to
his coat-tails that nothing would do but she must have him back again
into the house, and brush his back as clean as if the Kuhschnappel
municipality would charge him paving-tax if any of the mud were found
on him. He would take hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and
say, "There's a good deal _inside_ as well; but nobody sees it there;
when I come back we'll set to work and scrub some of _that_ away."
Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her daughterly
observance and fulfilment of them, were more than he looked for or
required, indeed; but not too great for the love he bestowed in return.
"Senate clerk's daughter," he said, "you mustn't be _too_ obedient to
me; remember I'm not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor's advocate
who has married you and signs himself Siebenkæs, to the best of his
belief."
"My poor dear father," she answered, "used often to compose and write
down things too at home, himself, with his own hand, and then fair-copy
them beautifully afterwards." But he enjoyed these crooked answers
which she used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, she
never understood a single one of the jokes which he was always making
about himself (for she gainsaid him when he satirically depreciated
himself, and agreed with him completely if he ironically lauded
himself), yet these mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a
little. She would use such words as "fleuch" for "fliehe," "reuch" and
"kreuch" for "riehe" and "kriehe;" religious antiquities out of
Luther's Bible, which were valuable and enjoyable contributions to her
stock of idiosyncracies, and to the happiness of his honeymoon. One day
when he took a particularly pretty cap which she had tried on with
much satisfaction to each of her three cap-blocks, one after another
(she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks), and putting it on her
own little head before the looking-glass, said, "See how it looks on
your _own_ head; perhaps that's as good a block as the others," she
laughed with immense delight, and said, "Now, you are always flattering
one!"
Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so touched him
that he made a secret vow never to make another of the kind, except in
private to himself. But there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still.
This was that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no account
allow him to kiss her, when she came into the room (ready for church),
her white and red bloom of youth shining out with threefold beauty from
under her black lace head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress.
"Worldly thoughts of that kind," she said, "weren't at all proper
before service, when people had on their fast-day things; people must
wait!"
"By heaven!" said Siebenkæs to himself, "may I stick a soup spoon five
inches long and three broad through my lower lip, like a North American
squaw, and go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing
the pious soul again, when she has a black dress on, and the bells are
ringing." And though he wasn't much of a churchgoer himself, he kept
his word. See how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!
From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate
was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner,
did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for
himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by
unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean
and level and smooth as a billiard-table. Whole honey-trees full of
cakes did she plant during the honeymoon; humming round him of a
morning like a busy bee, carrying wax into her little hive (while he
was going quietly on with his law-papers, building away at his
juridical wasp's nest), forming her cells, cleaning them out, ejecting
foreign bodies, and mending chinks; he now and then looking out of his
wasp's nest at the pretty little figure in the tidiest of household
dresses, at sight of which he would take his pen in his mouth, hold his
hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, "Only wait till the
afternoon comes and you're sitting sewing--then, as I walk up and down,
I shall pay you with kisses to your heart's content." But that none of
my fair readers may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of this
moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard Blaise might
bring about, let me just ask one question? Hadn't Siebenkæs a whole
silver mine and a coining mill, in the shape of seven law suits all
going on, full of veins of rich ore? And hadn't Leibgeber sent him a
military treasury chest on four wheels of fortune, containing two
spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of Brunswig, a Russian triple-dollar
of 1679, a tail or queue ducat--a gnat or wasp dollar--five vicariat
ducats, and a heap of Ephraimites? For he might melt down and
volatilise this collection of coins without a moment's hesitation,
inasmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way of a jest on the
people who pay a hundred dollars for one. They two had all things
corporeal and mental in common to an extent comprehensible by few. They
had arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible between
the giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they stepped across the
chasms of life bound together, as the crystal-seekers in the Alps tie
themselves to each other to prevent their falling into the ice clefts.
One Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon an idea which will
quite reassure all fair readers of his history who may be in a state of
anxiety about him, and which made _him_ happier than the receipt of the
biggest basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would have
done--or a hamper of wine. He had felt sure all along that he _would_
hit upon an idea. Whenever he was in a difficulty of any kind, he
always used to say, "Now, I wonder what I shall hit upon _this_ time;
for I _shall_ hit upon something or other as sure as there are four
chambers in my brain." The delightful idea in question was, that he
should do what I am doing at this moment--write a book; only his was to
be a satirical one.[22] A torrent of blood rushed through the opened
sluices of his heart, right in amongst the wheels and mill-machinery of
his ideas, and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled, whirred, and
jingled in a moment--a peck or two of material for the book was ground
on the spot.
I know of no greater mental tumult--hardly of any sweeter--which can
arise in a young man's being, than that which he experiences when he is
walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he
will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed
it is a point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal
the great general, strode up and down _their_ rooms at a greater pace
when they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they
would go to Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a
'Selection from the Devil's Papers,' was forced to run out of the
house, and three times round the market-place, just to fix his
fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper grooves again by the
process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by the glow within
him--looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house for his
manuscript--and running up to his Lenette, who was tranquilly working
away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take the needle
out of her mouth--last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss she
quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting
down at it the best way she could without moving her head).
"Rejoice with me!" he cried, "come and dance about with me! to-morrow
I'm going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf's head to-night,
though it be a breach of our ten commandments." For he and she, on the
Wednesday before, had formed themselves into a committee on food
regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy,
which had then been passed and subscribed to, one was that,
Brahminlike, they were to do without meat at supper.
But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it
was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another
calf's head with a single sheet of the 'Selections from the Devil's
Papers,' and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation
from that evening's fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like
the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the
same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more
than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of
the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like
Racine's wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was,
although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never
lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn't
capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me
over with his hour-glass in the middle of,--or who wouldn't be
unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or
universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I
deserved perhaps.
The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs's blood-globules into
such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening
that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he
was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper),
he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating
gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across--such as
the servant girl's heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with
which her utterance was afflicted;--but that he at once laid hold on a
precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness,
and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a
rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than
to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which
rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm
himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible
Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith
our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal
Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by
thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least
being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce,
untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within
due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy
would either _not_ have died at all, or would have died of a _better_
and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful
heavenward gaze.
His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks,
between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a
zealous and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in
the case of a girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture
on the rack. The state-physician of the borough had condemned her to
the "trial by the lungs," a neither more nor less suitable punishment
than the "trial by water" (which used to be inflicted on witches).
Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down
their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon.
Only there sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was
stretching herself and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly
accomplishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gentleman
in flesh-coloured silk.
"I really feel quite ashamed to stretch," she said; "there's a
gentleman always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and
notes one down just as if he were the meat appraiser."
The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the
solemn promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them
often, and at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think
I shall call him Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the
ear--seeing that the whole town gave him that name on account of the
gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of
a portable wood-economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he
came in at the door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and
stuck them into the advocate's button-bole, by appointing him on the
spot his collaborateur on the 'Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly
Messenger, and School Programme Review'--a work which ought to be
better known, so that the works recommended by it might be so too. This
newspaper engagement of Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at
any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so towards a supper now and then.
The Schulrath, who was editor of this paper, had a high sense of the
power and responsibility of his post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to
the dignity of an author--the only being who in his eyes was superior
even to a reviewer--for Lenette had told him on the way to church that
her husband was going to have a great thick book printed. The Schulrath
considered the 'Salzburg Literary Gazette' of the period the
apocryphal, and the 'Jena Literary Gazette' the canonical scriptures:
the single voice of one reviewer was, for _his_ ears, multiplied by the
echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded
imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several
Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to
surround the heads of sinners with delusive _false_ heads, that the
executioner might miss his stroke at them.
The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single
individual's opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if
arrived at by a whole council; but then if his name were put at the
end, for instance, "X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity," instead of "New
Universal German Library," it would weaken the effect of the divinity
student's learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. The
Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his satirical turn; for
he himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed himself into a
wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently the case with
good-tempered men when they write, particularly on _humaniora_ and such
like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to Gibbon)
are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just as the Idyllic
painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.
And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this
evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such,
when he took from Leibgeber's collection of coins a gnat or wasp
dollar, and gave it to him, not as a douceur for his appointment
to the critical wasp's nest, but that he might turn it into small
change. The Schulrath who, being himself the zealous "Silberdiener"
(master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own,
would have been delighted if money had existed solely for the
sake of cabinets--(meaning, however, numismatic, not political,
cabinets)--sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared
to the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the
coin-fancier's price) that he considered this a piece of true
friendship. "No," answered Siebenkæs, "the only piece of true
friendship about the matter is Leibgeber giving _me_ the dollar." "But
I'll give you certainly three dollars for it, if you like to ask it,"
said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel's delight, and at his
kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as an admonition
not to give way, here struck in with an amount of determination which
astonishes me, "But my husband's not going to do anything of the kind,
I assure you; a dollar's a dollar." "But," said Siebenkæs, "I ought
rather to ask you only a _third_ of the price, if I'm going to hand
over my coins to you one at a time in this way." Ye dear souls! If
people's "yeses" in this world were only always such as your "buts."
Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn't going to let himself
be found wanting, on such a delightful occasion as this, at all events,
in proper politeness towards the fair sex, least of all towards a woman
whom he had begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her home
to be married, and whom he liked twice as much now that she was the
wife of such a dear friend, and was such a dear friend herself too. He
therefore adroitly led her to join in the conversation (which had
previously been too deep and scholarly for her) by using the three
cap-blocks as stepping-stones over to the journal of fashions; only he
slid back again sooner than he might have done to a more ancient
journal of fashions, that of Rubenius on the 'Costume of the ancient
Greeks and Romans.' He said he should be happy to lend her his sermons
every Sunday, as advocates don't deal in theology much. And when she
was looking on the floor at her feet for the snuffers which had fallen,
he held the candle down that she might see.
The next Sunday was an important day for the house (or rather rooms) of
Siebenkæs, for it introduced thereto a grander character than any who
have appeared hitherto, namely the Venner (Finance Councillor)--Mr.
Everard Rosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, who went
daily in and out at Heimlicher von Blaise's to "learn the routine of
official business;" he was also engaged to be married to a poor niece
of the Heimlicher's, who was being brought up and educated for his
heart in another part of Germany.
Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the borough of
Kuhschnappel as well as in our 'Thorn-piece,' and this in every
political point of view. In a corporeal point of view he was much less
so. His body was stuck through his flowered garments much like a piece
of stick through a village nosegay; under the shining wing-covers of
his waistcoat (in itself a perfect animal-picture)[23] there
pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not absolutely concave, and his
legs had, all told, about the same amount of calf as those wooden ones
which stocking-makers put into their windows as an advertisement.
The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold and politely rude
manner, that he had merely come to relieve him from the task of
defending the case of child-murder, as he had so much to attend to
besides. But Siebenkæs saw through this pretence with great ease. It
was a well-known circumstance that the girl accused of this crime had
adopted as the father of her child (now flown, away above this earth) a
certain commercial traveller, whose name neither she nor the documents
connected with her case could mention; but that the real father--who,
like a young author, was bashful about putting his name to his _pièce
fugitive_--was no other than the emaciated Venner, Everard Rosa von
Meyern himself. There are certain things which a whole town will
determine and make up its mind to ignore; and one of these was Rosa's
authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that Siebenkæs was aware of it,
however, and feared that he might, out of revenge for the affair of the
inheritance, purposely make a poor defence of the girl, that the shame
and disgrace of her end might fall upon his relative, Meyern's
shoulders. What a terrible, mean suspicion!
And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to entertain such
suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkæs had already got the poor mother's
lightning-conductor all ready forged and set up. When he showed it to
this false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, the latter
immediately declared that she could not have found an abler guardian
saint among all the advocates in the town; to which author and reader
can both add "nor one who should be actuated by worthier motives," as
we know he did it as a thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of
the 'Devil's Papers.'
At this juncture, the advocate's wife came suddenly back from the
adjoining bookbinder's room, where she had been paying a flying visit.
The Venner sprang to meet her at the threshold with a degree of
politeness which couldn't have been carried further, inasmuch as she
had to open the door before he could reach her. He took her hand,
which, in her respect and awe of him, she half permitted, and kissed it
stooping, but twisted his eyes up to her face, and said:
"Meddem! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for several days."
It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the identical
flesh-coloured gentleman who had stolen her hand with his drawing-pen
when she had had it out of the window; because he had been anxious to
get a pretty Dolce's hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young
lady he was engaged to, and hadn't known what to do; her _head_ he was
doing from memory. He then took off his gloves, in which alone he had
dared as yet to touch her (as many of the early Christians used only to
touch the Eucharist in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying the
fires of his rings and the snow of his skin. To preserve the whiteness
of the latter from the sun, he hardly ever took his gloves off, except
in winter when the sun has scarcely power to burn.
The Kuhschnappel aristocracy, particularly its younger members, give a
willing obedience to the commandment which Christ gave to His apostles,
to "greet no man by the way," and the Venner observed the required
degree of incivility towards the husband, though not by any means to
the wife, towards whom his condescension was infinite. An inborn
characteristic of Siebenkæs's satirical disposition was a fault which
he had of being too polite and kindly with the lower classes, and too
forward and aggressive with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient
knowledge of the world to enable him to determine the precise angle at
which his back should bend before the various great ones of the place,
wherefore he preferred to go about bolt upright, though he did so
against the promptings of his kind heart. An additional cause was, that
the profession to which he belonged being of a belligerent nature, has
a tendency to embolden those who belong to it; an advocate has the
advantage of never requiring to employ one himself, and consequently he
is often inclined to treat even the grandest folks with some amount of
coolness, unless they happen to be judges or clients, at the disposal
of both of which classes of society his best services are at all times
ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it generally happened that,
in Siebenkæs's kindly feeling to all mankind, his moveable bridge got
shoved down so low under his tightened strings that the notes given out
by them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion, however, it
was much more difficult to be polite to the Venner (whose designs as
regarded Lenette he was compelled to see) than to be rude to him.
Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men although--just,
the contrary feeling for dressy women--so that he would often sit and
stare for a long time at the little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the
fashion journals, just to get properly angry at them; and he would
assure the Kuhschnappelers that there was nobody whom he should so
delight in playing practical jokes upon as on such a mannikin--yea, in
insulting him, or even doing him an injury (to the extent of a good
cudgelling). Also it had always been a source of delight to him that
Socrates and Cato walked barefoot about in the market-place; going
_bareheaded_, on the other hand (_chapeau bas_), he did not like half
so much.
But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by making faces, the
wooden-head of a Venner stroked his sprouting beard, and in a distant
manner graciously offered himself to the advocate in the capacity of
cardinal protector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business; this
he did, of course, partly to blind the advocate's eyes, and partly to
impress upon him how immeasurably inferior was his station. The latter,
however, shuddering at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for
paraclete and household angel, said to him (but in Latin)--
"In the first place I must _insist_ that my wife shall not hear a
syllable about that insignificant potato quarrel. And moreover, in any
legal question I scorn and despise anybody's assistance but a legal
friend's, and in this instance _I_ am my own legal friend. I fill an
official position here in Kuhschnappel; it is true, the official
position by no means fills _me_." The latter play upon words he
expressed by means of a Latin one, which displayed such an unusual
amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost like to quote it
here. The Venner, however, who could neither construe the pun nor the
rest of the speech with the ease with which we have read it here,
answered at once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in
the same language, "Imo, immo," which he meant for yes. Firmian then
went on, in German, saying, "Guardian and ward, intimate as their
connection should be, in this case came into contact to an extent
almost too great to be pleasant; although, no doubt, there _have_ been
cases before where one cousin has cozened another:[24] however, the
very members of ecclesiastical councils have come to fisticuffs before
now, _e. g_. at Ephesus in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the Abbot
Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria, men of position,
pummelled the good Flavian on that very occasion till he was as dead as
a herring.[25] And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which, in these
absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quarrels and differences of
every description; though now, Sundays and feast-days are the very days
when the peace is broken; the public-house bells and the tinkling of
the glasses ring the truce _out_, and people pummel each other, so that
the law gets _her_ finger into the pie. In old days, people multiplied
the number of saints' days for the sake of stopping fights, but the
fact is that everybody connected with the legal profession, Herr von
Meyern (who _must_ have _something_ to live upon), ought to petition
that a peaceable working-day or two might be abolished now and then, so
that the number of rows might be increased, and with them the fines and
the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks of such a thing, Venner?"
He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this before Lenette;
she had long been accustomed to understanding only a half, a fourth, or
an eighth part of what he said; as for the _whole_ Venner, she gave
herself no concern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure with
frigid politeness, Siebenkæs, with the view of helping to advance him
in his wife's good opinion, extolled his whole and undivided love for
the entire female sex (though engaged to be married), and more
particularly his attachment to that preliminary bride of his, who was
now in the condemned cell of the prison; this, however, rather seemed
to have the effect of _lowering_ him in her good opinion.
"Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful to yourself and to
me!" said he, taking her to his heart. But she didn't _know_ that she
had been faithful, and said, "to whom should I be _un_faithful?"
From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was the day of the
borough fair, fortune seems to have led our _pathway_, I mean the
reader's and mine, through no very special flower-beds to speak of, but
merely along the smooth green turf of an English lawn, one would
suppose on purpose that the fair on Michaelmas Day may suddenly arise
upon our view as some shining, dazzling town starts up out of a valley.
Very little did occur until then; at least, my pen, which only
considers itself bound to record incidents of some importance, is not
very willing to be troubled to mention that the Venner Meyern dropped
in pretty often at the bookbinder's (who lived under the same roof with
the Siebenkæses)--he merely came to see whether the 'Liaisons
Dangereuses' were bound yet.
But that Michaelmas! Truly the world shall remember it. And in fact the
very eve of it was a time of such a splendid and exquisite quality that
we may venture to give the world some account of it.
Let the world _read_ the account of this eve of preparation at all
events, and then give its vote.
On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other places are at
such a time) was turned into a workhouse and house of industry for
women; you couldn't have found a woman in the whole town either sitting
down, or at peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to reading
opened no books but needle-books to take needles out, and the only
leaves they turned over were paste ones to be put on pies. Scarcely a
woman took any dinner; the Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of
them were the sole mainspring of the feminine machinery.
On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of
pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and
minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour's nobility;
and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or
the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They
scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their
consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers;
only the latter (in their friend's and hostess's houses) tastes best,
and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony
and shot and dagger proof--or is burnt to a cinder--or, in short, is
wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the
failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking
them to their own houses and treating them to something of a _very
different_ kind.
As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker
of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and
female connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but
she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The
kitchen fire was this salamander's second element, for the first and
native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand,
and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like
Siebenkæs's (who had devoted all Leibgeber's Ephraimites to the keeping
of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her
glowing face on such a day--and indeed she had her hands pretty full,
for at ten o'clock the butcher came bringing more work with him.
The world will be glad (I'm perfectly certain in my own mind) if
I just give them a very short account of this business--_who_ could
have done it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at
the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together
and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to
fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor's advocate and the
hairdresser--between whom and his tenants there was this distinction,
that they owed _their_ rent to _him_, whereas he owed _his_ to his
creditors--caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which
was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic instrument (here
KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual
manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the Roman
law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the
four contracting parties aforesaid--who all stood attentively round the
document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted--bound and engaged
themselves in manner following, that is to say, that--
1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said
cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.
2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray
from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the
carriage of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the
same; and
3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day
before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow,
but further that each quarter of the same should then and there be
further divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for
partition among the said parties to the said contract.
Siebenkæs prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each;
he never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to
be performed of the contract by the house association of our four
evangelists, who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or
emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of
that of Saint Luke--was the third article of it.
However, I know the learned classes are panting for my fair, so I shall
only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of
course goes on taking me to task).
That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well,
though it was at the close of Fructidor--the four messmates looking on
throughout the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal,
and got something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself on the
slain animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed something
in order that the butcher might be included gratis; and it is
undeniable that one member of the league, whom I shall name hereafter,
attended this picnic in a frame of mind and in a costume barely serious
enough for the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to
working its division sum, according to the number of its members, and
the golden calf round which their dance was executed was cut, up with
the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I
can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the whole process
of zootomic division was carried out than what Siebenkæs, an interested
party, said himself, viz., "It's to be wished that the twelve tribes of
Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had been divided
into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have been."
I shall be doing ample justice to the cow's embonpoint if I merely
mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with
the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an
(adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered
in mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor
beast, and "blessed us unworthy sinners above measure." A frolicsome
cult by nature, he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to
him, and was consequently obliged to keep softening down the "strong
language" which came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate
to his "converted state." And it was to the frame of mind and the
costume of this very FECHT that I made allusion above as being barely
suitable to the occasion, for I'm sorry to say he had no breeches on
him the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and down the
slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his wife's, having a strange
general effect of looking something like his own better half. However,
the members of the association didn't take any offence; he couldn't
help it, because while he was going about got up in this Amazon's
_demi-negligée_, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his own
black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a
reissue.
The poor's advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in
the afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind
bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once,
save himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn'orth of
pastry: but the busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and
by six o'clock they were both lying resting in the leather arms of--a
big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no bones), and looking
around them with that expression of tranquil happiness which you may
see in children while eating, at the room in its state of mathematical
order, at the way in which everything in it was shining, at the pastry
new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or
rather foilgold[26]) of the setting sun creeping up and up upon the
gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and reposed like cradled
children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of
the rest of the people of the house going on all round them; and the
clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a full
half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer
of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes
till they lapsed into dreams.
At ten o'clock they woke up and went to bed...!
I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head
has reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere
of my watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is
the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the
evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the
evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such
eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were
gathered, an image and emblem of thyself--I mean the autumn daisy, the
flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and
gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is
not till the--coming spring that that fruit is ripe!
But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come
beating upon our hero's bedposts! He comes into the white, shining
room, which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight
to wash while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like
an Arabia; in which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a
fair-day morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out,
as Siebenkæs did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden
booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the
coming deluge of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn't by
my advice that my hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there
were samples of every kind of pastry which the house contained on a
table behind him), called down to many of the little green aristocratic
caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the street with even greater
arrogance than his own, and whose natural history he felt inclined to
learn by a look at their faces.
"I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that
one there--do you notice anything particular?"
If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study
it at his ease,--which was of course his object.
"You don't notice anything particular?" he would ask.
When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same
up at the window, saying:
"No, of course not! I've been looking at it for the last twelve months
myself, and can't see anything particular about it; but I didn't choose
to believe my own eyes."
Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop down
and disappear--as it did that Saturday when the cards were left. As
yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the
forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at
a gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful
soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty
manuscript books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of
"novelties," in almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a
wheelbarrow, which he had to make two journeys with in going, but only
one in returning in the evening, because then he had got rid of his
almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs are the greatest of all
novelties, or pieces of news--for there is nothing in all the long
course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East
India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the town
gate; she wouldn't have let that warehouse of hers go to her own
brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a
stitch in no shoe on this St. Michael's Day except his wife's.
Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and
empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the
devil and his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking
(after the nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison
cup, made ready and handing it to you.
But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless
beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.
A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes
attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have
nothing to walk upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards
the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself
the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are
fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen _Fŭrth_, or been in
Elwangen during P. Gassner's government, may cut these few leaves out
of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead
him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.
The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The
blind sing like blinded singing-birds--better, but louder; the lame
walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a
terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells--everybody
sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else's--a paternoster is
clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody
can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on
one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their
ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people
don't give them enough--in brief, the borough which had made up its
mind for a day's enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the
rabble of beggars.
And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a
wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and
fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives
and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the
vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit.
Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms.
Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars' talent, disease, above
all paralysis, the beggars' _vapeurs_--trades with his talent, and the
body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and
the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery
and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their
position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first
and foremost, other people's cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and
arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most
extraordinary fellow--(to be admired at a distance, though impossible
to be equalled--looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such
blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without
longing to possess it); there's only half of him there, because the
other half's in his grave already, everything you could call legs
having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a
position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and
generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal
car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment,
has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. "A soldier," said
Siebenkæs, "who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground
expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, 'Why am _I_ not shot to
pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he
does?' seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are
thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven't even _one_
wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even
_that_ fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of
his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still
keep on asking, 'Why not more?'"
Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over
themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about
their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,--when, for
instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting
at some shepherd's hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters,
their martyrs' crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off,
leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just
for a minute; or--since what everybody works for is, not merely to
live, but to live a little better now and then--when the beggar too has
something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple
pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with
him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for
_our_ ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).
About 11 o'clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a
handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian's wedding soup--to wit, Herr
Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of
coming to call that afternoon, "because there was such a good view of
the market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can't issue
orders in any houses but their own, construct _in_ their own, with much
ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his
attack from--within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the
Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to
determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be
told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then
behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose
the latter as the smaller.
Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob's
ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the
evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on
to Lenette's two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable
property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the
false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her
heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set
agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and
with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.
The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of
ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing
her with the idea that she shouldn't give herself the slightest bother
of any kind about the nincompoop. "It was no good," she said, "what
would he think of me?" It was not until having eliminated from the room
as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that
minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the 'Selection from
the Devil's Papers,' she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his
writing-table--that the head of the house ramped up--on his hind legs,
pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.
Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart
could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly;
one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks.
He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over;
and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the
insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He
was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often
shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused
many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of
stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he
grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of
religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there.
Thunder was to him a watchman's rattle, arousing him from the sleep of
sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was
pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or
later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he
doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn
duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man
of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment's
hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet
of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his
teeth and snarls at them.
Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest
satiric touch, and you can't manage to hit them with one, richly as
they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the
resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had
Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these
yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away
good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair
names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is
good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.
Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression!
His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks
were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom
painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann's Zoological
Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing
about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars,
merely in passing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though,
that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his
fingers,--there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even
beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.
We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression "it was
shod with rings like a horse's hoof," it has been long applied to the
horse's hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the
latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of
these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed
rings ar
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