END OF BOOK I.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.
It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every preface I write I am obliged to append a book—like the endorsement on a bill of exchange—or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their foreheads—which is nothing but painting the corona about the sun. As yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize medals and commemoration medals of other people’s cleverness at the service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off wholesale before very long (I don’t see what else I can do), and bring out a book—consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.
They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair, and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary world will only be beglorified in corpore, in coro, and I shall be (so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic of letters in the lump,—as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death, hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many lines—for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of a hundred five-dollar pieces.
I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,—as one cannot quite lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty—I carefully pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public are, by them, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah’s chariot, of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.
In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author of ‘Hesperus’ has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces, and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well worthy of perusal.
PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘HESPERUS.’
The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.
Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit, which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own immortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.
The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries’ breeding cages have to be more roomy than their singing cages.
If this be so, then, what does the author’s pen do? Like a child’s, it traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the reader with pencil.
The author’s strings only vibrate in unison with the reader’s octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds—not with his seconds or sevenths. Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author’s level or pass beyond it.
And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet’s grapes as though they were real ones, thinking the boy a painted one, when we really ought to be frightened at him.
The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support of the proposition)—relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we must continue to worship what remains—that is to say, the worms which have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms are quite equal to one dragon.
This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to have any sense in it which is,—that no man is wholly indifferent to, and unaffected by, every kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to poetical reflections (illusions) that he swears allegiance—inasmuch as he does even that he thereby does homage to truth; for in all poetry it is but the part which is true which goes to the heart (or head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever but a reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not be a reflection. Every semblance (meaning every thing which we see, or suppose we see) presupposes the existence of light somewhere, and is itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only, most people in our, not so much enlightened as enlightening times, are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of day, but, in the night, fly to every nocturnal light, every phosphorescent surface.
The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such levellings and flattenings—ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world—the trees of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty—are watered with) have been shed, but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king, drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side, and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light—as comets are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field only—upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of truth—the pedestal whereon history raises on high some single hero whose name rings in all men’s ears has to be composed and built up of thousands of other heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls, not before the public gaze,—and as history keeps record only of the men sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood, doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the men not being taken into account.
These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of joy with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given them a good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting insect (before we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the brain;[[34]] and who—tell me if you can—is to get it out again? Whereas little or nothing of a risky sort can be snuffed up out of Flower-pieces, and their painted calices, since painted worms remain where they are.
This, then, is what I have to postulate by means of similes. What the public postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces. The author is a promising youth of five years of age;[[35]] he and I have been friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends. He gets me to read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give him my opinion and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to him with the warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict somewhat more widely known, believing as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps) that it may carry a certain amount of weight with it, more especially as it is an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed in the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith to draw the lines upon which their verdicts may be written.
In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the work is written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater amount of dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and, happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate’s lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name of this future work; it is the ‘Titan.’ In this work he means to be an absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother soft. “Then” (he always says—very sadly however—because he sees what a hard matter it is to distinguish between full half of our battling and harrying here below and a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter buffoonery and nonsense,—also, that the cradle of this life rocks us, and stills us indeed, but carries us not a step on our way)—“then may the Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis[[36]] of the Ideal, beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me, and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt down and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of its death-dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the title ‘Travellers’ REST,’ if no one ever enters it?” He wants, by way of broad “flies” for his life stage on earth, merely a regular, downright, rainy year or two (two will suffice); for a broad, bright, open sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand’s pen power by making the eyes over full. And here the book-maker differs markedly from his provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts his mill up precisely when the weather is wet.
I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once more through the few chapters composing the first book—that they may see what they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading twice is not worth reading once.
In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the production of other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp, trusting that the reading world may form its opinion on his work with the same careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.
Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.
Thus far my friend’s preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface, you see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but sign myself as my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,
Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Hof in Voigtland,
June 5th, 1796.
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.
Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of Christ—five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully accompanied our hero through the five joyful mysteries of which the Linden honey-month of his marriage has had to tell. I now come with him to the five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries of most marriages is—concluded. I trust, however, that his may yet be found to contain the five of Glory also.
In my first edition, I began this book of my hero’s story in an unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were literally correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however, renders it incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen mysteries in question do not come one after another, like steps of stairs, or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together like good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in its duration, as has been the case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our planet itself, which has survived several last days, and as a consequence still more springs, that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention all this to save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought that they have got to wade through a whole “Book II.” full of tears, partly to be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon them and swallow them up.
When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul’s fever—the grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a pantograph made a correct, reduced copy of his yesterday’s free translation of the Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely. When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of her, “We’ll send him the profile this morning, at once. It may be a good long while before he comes to fetch it.” “Oh yes! he won’t be here till Wednesday, and by that time he’ll have forgotten all about it.” “But I could bring him here sooner than that,” Siebenkæs answered; “I need only send him the Russian Trinity dollar of 1679 to get changed for me; he won’t send me a farthing of the money he’ll bring it himself as he always has done all through Leibgeber’s collection.” “Or you might send him the dollar and the picture both,” said Lenette, “he would like it better.” “Which would he like better?” he asked. She didn’t see exactly what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she meant the stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in this sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, “Well, the things, of course.” He spared her any further catechising.
The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that he was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would come to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the advocate, by the end of the following week at latest. The little dash of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected answer of the too happy Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by the arrival at this moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office, with Heimlicher von Blaise’s first proceedings in the matter of the plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition for three weeks’ grace within which to lodge answers, a delay which the Court had readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor’s advocate, lived in the sure and certain hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, though he would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the children, and the children’s children, for the uprightness of the fathers, and for the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live upon during one’s own lifetime. The Russian Trinity dollar—for which the Schulrath hadn’t even paid as yet—couldn’t be lived upon, and there were but one or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided by Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the Heimlicher. This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have said nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the Leibgeberian saviour’s scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps be accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to avoid mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.
“Oh! I shall get on somehow or other,” said Siebenkæs quite gleefully, as he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of getting a considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest moment possible, in the shape of payment for his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers.’
But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till it blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying anything about the fire in question till now, though he has been sitting roasting at it since the day before yesterday, Lenette being the cook, and his writing table the larkspit.
During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette was doing, as he sat writing away at his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers’; and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very slightest shake of anything affected him just as if he had had hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two fine young ideas to death, as a louder noise kills young canaries, or silkworms.
He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself that his wife really could not help moving about, and that as long as she hadn’t a spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with, she couldn’t possibly go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her invisible good and evil angels behind her. But while he was listening to this cours de morale, this collegium pietatis of his own, he lost the run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.
But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go much more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened the profile, and had only his own original creations to go on blackening—i. e. when he was going to begin working in his own charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary—
“If you can help it, Lenette, don’t make very much noise to-day. I really can hardly get on with my writing, if you do—you know it’s for publication.”
She said “I’m sure you can’t hear me—I go about so very quietly.”
Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet in every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which he has fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of these days that Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to see what Lenette would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the floor, and athwart the various webs of her household labours, with the tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had disputed his little point, merely for the sake of disputing it, not of doing what she was asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to keep his ears very much on the alert to hear what little noise she did make, either with her hands or her feet—but he was successful, and did hear the greater part of it. Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a slight noise than to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she went, his ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the satire, called “The Nobleman with the Ague,” and jump up and cry to her (as she went creeping about), “For one whole hour have I been listening and watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather you would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used to wear for beating time in.[[37]] Please go about as you usually do, darling.”
She complied, and went about almost as she usually did. He would have very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking, as he had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn’t care to contradict himself twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening he asked her if she would mind going about the house in her stockings when he was at work at his writing. She would find it nice and cool for the feet. “In fact,” he added, “as I’m working all the forenoon literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary while I am at my literary work.”
Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went on behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the free-pass of necessity—going on with his writing all the time, but doing it worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many things with as much patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline took to whisking the straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with a long broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened, moreover, that he had been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris of scientific inquirers, that a clergyman, of the name of Johann Pechmann, couldn’t bear the sound of a besom—that it nearly took his breath away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted when a crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The effect of his having read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant and intolerant of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the next room, from his chair where he sat—
“Lenette, do not go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom of yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head. There was an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would rather have been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than to listen to another sweeping it—he would rather have been flogged with a birch-broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing and whishing. How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and scrubbing going on?”
Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did with his writing. However the editor of the ‘Devil’s Papers’ managed to hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the bedroom door and called in at the room, “My darling, it’s every bit as hellish a torment to me if I can hear it at all. You may fan those miserable sweepings with a peacock’s feather, or a holy-water asperger, or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor book must suffer and pay the piper all the same.”
“I’m quite done now, at all events,” she said.
He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth satire, “Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I at first intended to subsist.”
Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and cried—
“Lenette, I can’t hear very distinctly what it is—but you’re up to something or other in there that I can not stand. For God’s dear sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of Werther, for this one day—come here, let me see you.”
She answered, all out of breath with hard work—
“I’m not doing anything.”
He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a magnified canaries’ breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of bedroom air, and said, in measured accents—
“You’re at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know quite well that I’m sitting there working like a slave for you and myself too, and that I’ve been writing away for the last hour with scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all your cartridges at one shot, for God’s sake, and don’t finish me off altogether with that rag of yours.”
Lenette, full of astonishment said, “It’s simply impossible, old man. that you can hear me in the next room”—and polished away harder than ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said in a louder tone, “Come, get up!—It’s exactly that which I complain of, that I can’t hear you in the next room; I’m obliged to rack my brains to guess what you’re at—and the only ideas left in my head are connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that I really can not stand, is a quiet noise.”
All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out of the room, rag and all, saying—
“It does seem a little hard that, while I’m labouring away here with all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should be started in my own room, and that an author’s very bed should be turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his ears out of it. There, I shan’t be writing while we’re at dinner, I’ll talk the thing out at full length with you then.”
At noon, then,[[38]] as he was about to enter on the subject of the morning’s tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this: “prayers” do not, in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain hereditary office and service of mass in a court chapel, but—the ringing of the twelve o’clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded above twice during his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it a thousand times running[[39]]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a fox‘s (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a pill.
To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a calm tone of voice, however—
“The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know, people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches—and ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two conspirators who will blow out your husband’s candle—to use a strong expression—before they have done.”
This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew’s Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn’t leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a certificate of poverty, a testimonium paupertatis, in the face of the whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk’s daughter from Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man of folly couldn’t be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat, particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with respect to it himself, by saying. “This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure you. I don’t wear a tail myself,” he added, “but that’s no reason why a ducat shouldn’t, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it’s a queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands every day.” The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn’t vouchsafe the ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.
When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette’s face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation; wherefore Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. “The principal prizes,” he said, “are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you and I shall dine on St. Andrew’s Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I only take a little pains. And at all events don’t worry yourself, darling, because our money’s nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle, more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over my mother’s property. Only for God’s sake don’t let your work interrupt mine. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial dollar at ninety kreuzer)—and I ought, to get more—I should have earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a (printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel. Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink bottle, as I’ve often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on with your dinner, and listen. I’ll just take this opportunity of explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the people whether they’ll like it or not. We authors in our irritation often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault with other people’s. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your hymn-book is). And they’ll peer all through my productions to see whether or not I’ve written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too large or too small), whether I’ve put any wrong letters, a little e for a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense, and it’ll all be printed. Of course that’s a terrible thing to happen to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers (buttonmakers’ nails are shorter, but not circumcisers’ among the Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia in so many plain words that I’m an ass. May the devil confound their impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and legibly, and with proper attention and ability—and every sheet of my Devilish Papers is so written—if I carefully weigh and consider every word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place, instructive in another, pleasing in all,—in that case I am bound to tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head, and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they hadn’t expected it of me, and there was really something in me. Now a panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking ‘Where does he live, this Siebenkæs whom everybody’s talking of?’ there are sure to be lots of folks in the Fuggery to answer, ‘Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good wife she is to him.’”
“You’ve told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times,” she answered. “And it’s just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure he has all the best books through his hands, binding them.”
This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant ill-temperedly, he didn’t very much relish. In fact, the habit had hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself to himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts; accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible) remarks from her husband’s lips daily, she can’t help remembering them when they occur again.
The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a set of church mice and he hadn’t succeeded. The whole garrison of them were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them didn’t see how they were to pay it when it was due. So the Saxon came to the grandee of his house, to the “Lord of Ducats” as he styled the advocate. Siebenkæs couldn’t find in his heart to disappoint the patient soul with another “no” on the top of those he had borne so good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped together the little small change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves was—the question what they should do for light in the evening; for there weren’t even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a pound of candles, and there were no candles in natura.
I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich, reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings, true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of conquering the same. All that is base in man—thoughts, fancies, what we look on as being examples—all join in one chorus in praise of gold; why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her chevaliers d’honneur, philosophy and beggars’ pride?
The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of shame, “Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?”
“I’m only going to turn them into silver,” he said; “as kings make church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin. There’s nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of Brunswick turned a king’s silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends, sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world in that analysed form.”
“Ah! stupid nonsense,” she answered.
Some few readers will probably say “What else was it?” and I ought long ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.
He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice, and of his liking to hear himself do it. “Women,” he would repeat, “have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and therefore don’t waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might be better employed.” This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for Reinhold’s ‘Lexicon to Jean Paul’s Levana,’ nor for me personally either, in some senses.
“Ah! stuff and nonsense” had been Lenette’s answer. Firmian merely asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his reasons before a woman’s skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best answer he could have made. He said, “It was an angel that put it in my head; because on St. Andrew’s Day I shall regain everything that I turn into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes.”
What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old Sabel’s basket—and she was celebrated all over the town for transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. “Nobody gets it out of me,” she would say, “whose the things are. The treasurer, who’s dead and gone poor man—you know I sold everything he had in the world for him—he often used to say there was never the equal of me.”
But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[[40]] or “Descent of the Saviour into Hades” is but little likely to help you long, in that antechamber of hell which you’ve got into. The flames are gone from about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you, but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be blazing at your hearts! However, I don’t want to put any restrictions upon your trade in tin. We’re quite right to have a good dinner to-day though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry to-morrow again.
So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare had much of the weight of a confessor’s certificate, would sooner have let go her hold of everything in the world—her husband included—than of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely his obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right behind her author’s back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two kinds of gold in them for him, namely gold from the golden age, and ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn’t to be got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for her husband’s sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she can deny herself to almost any extent for others’ good, but not one bit for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself a better night’s sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her guests; but if it’s only her doctor and her own health that forbid her some Esau’s mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men’s sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.
Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again. Siebenkæs wasn’t long in becoming cognisant of this terrible alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his (satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when he would only be at his law papers—the tumour of his anger suddenly broke, and he grew mad, i. e. madder than he was before, and ran up to her and cried—
“Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you’re about. You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or not. Good God! It’s a thing I really can not comprehend. She sees as well as possible that my book is our larder—that there are whole rations of bread in every page of it—yet she holds my hands the entire morning, so that I can’t do a line of it. Here I’ve been sitting on the nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!”
“Very well,” said Lenette, “it’s all the same whatever I do, it’s sure to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman.”
And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder’s little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the whole day long upon a child’s toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole Alexander’s Feasts upon it, didn’t disturb him with his screeching unharmonical progressions—and how he bore the chimneysweep’s sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the room. And as he couldn’t quite manage to condense, just in a moment, into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a rage again, and say—
“Do you suppose I’m going to make a great long speech and explanation gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? Himmel! Kreuz! Wetter! The municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here’s my own wife harder than an old jurist—and not only that—she’s the coppersmith herself. I’ll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really speak to the Schulrath about this.” This did a great deal of service.
The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of principal importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times out of the advocate’s hearing.
This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of one.
“Listen, child,” he said, taking her hand very affectionately; “wouldn’t it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my writing in the evening? I mean, if the husband were to do his creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to each other with a candle between us—you at your sewing, I at my writing—the other people in the house would all have their work done and be at their beer—of course there wouldn’t be customers with bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about that now. What do you think, or what do you say (if you like the expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we’re quite rich again now—the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found money.”
“Oh! it will be delightful,” she said, “I shall be able to do all my household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper should.”
“Yes, just so,” he answered, “I shall write away quietly at my satires all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off.”
The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him than what she made with her needle. “When people are earning double working-pay by the light of one candle,” he said, greatly delighted at the domestic reformation, “they needn’t, as far as I see, restrict themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light. To-morrow we’ll set up a mould candle, and no more about it.”
As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, apropos of this candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his, concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two wicks projecting from every candle. “A law of combustion,” he would add, “in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down, it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity—just as people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs, with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and equalising its proportions.”
In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury’s touchstone of truth, ridicule. “Why, everybody that came in of an evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that everybody would blame.” So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present, as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top, he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of lighting.
However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the younger Pliny’s wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil’s Papers, it would be a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.
“Of course,” said she, “I shall be delighted.” The first fifteen or twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.
The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the candlestick a little bit, and said softly, “The candle.” Matters now began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette’s hands, had promised to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, “snuff” and “snuffers,” took bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and down on every letter of his most biting satires. “Lenette,” he had soon to say again, “please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on both our accounts.”
“Dear me, have I been forgetting it?” she said, and snuffed it in a great hurry.
Readers of a historical turn—such as I should wish mine to be—can now see that things couldn’t but get worse and worse, and more and more out of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length, waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word “Snuff!” Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, “Enlighten!” or “Behead!” or “Nip-off.” Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using other forms of speech, such as “The candle’s cap, Capmaker;” “There’s a long spot in the sun again;” or, “This is a charming chiaroscuro, well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but snuff away all the same.”
At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild manner, “You don’t snuff a bit—as far as I can see, the black funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till supper-time; and while we’re at supper I shall just say to you, as a rational man, what there is to say on the subject.” “Oh! yes, please,” she said, quite delighted.
When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced: “You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it appears; for, unfortunately, I can’t write with my toes under the table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the circumstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible eclipse—such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts, which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had only snuffed, as you ought to have done——”
“You’re in fun, are you not?” she asked. “My stitches are much smaller than your strokes, and I’m sure I saw quite well.”
“Well, dear,” he continued, “I’ll proceed to point out to you that, on the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn’t that it matters a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking sees a little more or less distinctly or not, it’s the snuffers and the snuff that he can’t get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it. For even when you’ve only just snuffed the candle, and I’m in the full enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you’ll do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others, it follows that all an author’s other and more valuable ideas are sent at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair. I, of course, ought not to have had to occupy my head with the idea of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black smut on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer—the darkness deepening—a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a half-dead writer, who can’t drive from his head the thought of the conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single snip;—then, my dearest Lenette, it’s not easy for the said writer to help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I express my own opinion and experience on the subject!”
On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would take great care to do it properly next evening.
And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word, for she not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the fact is, she hardly ever left off snuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.
“Don’t snuff too often, darling,” he said, at length, but very, very kindly. “If you attempt too fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of fractions of fractions of fractions) of the wick, it’ll be almost as bad as ever—a candle snuffed too short gives as little light as one with an overgrown wick which you may apply to the lights of the world and of the Church, that’s to say if you can. It’s only for a short while before and after the snuffing, entre chien et loup as it were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it can see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just proportion of black and white, both in the candle and on the book.”
I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor’s advocate has evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,—superficially perhaps, but still, watching and calculating—the mean term, or middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has he left for his work?
Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked, though somewhat doubtfully, “Dirty clothes for the wash already?” Next time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at her interrogatively, and said, “Well? well?”
“In one instant,” said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round it to the bargain.
“Oh, good Lord! ’Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!” cried he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle—out.
This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. “Just answer me,” he said.
She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised, he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system; and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for him; his heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke.
So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with absolute freedom of snuffing.
But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country, where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was no more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his freedom in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less prospect of repaying—I mean, rather than borrow—he would have sold all he had, and himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is said, the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, would make a ring round the earth, like a second equator; however, I have not as yet measured this nose-ring of the British Lion, this annular eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself. But I know that Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an iron ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then stop payment, as nations and banking-houses do—a catastrophe which debtors and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them, manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never beginning payment—yet, having only one friend whom he could convert into a creditor (Stiefel), he couldn’t possibly have seen this dear friend, who was in the first rank of his spiritual creditors already, figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore avoided such a two-fold transgression as this would have been—a sin against both friendship and honour—by pledging things of less value, namely, household furniture.
He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes or three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing behind his front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for travelling companions and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat, and a salad-bowl. Having effected this reduction of his army, he extended the remaining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and subdivided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He then moved these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and went and called Lenette, who was in the bookbinder’s room.
“I’ve been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten minutes,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have noticed, if I hadn’t known it, that I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?”
“Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life,” she declared.
Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be the result of too long an inspection, he hurried her into the sitting-room, where the dishes were which he had just taken out, and made known his intention of transposing, like a clever musician, this quartett from the key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the selling of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the feminine organ, the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop, vox humana, and, lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked; she said whatever she liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries to struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked her if she knew what else was to be done. To questions of this sort, there float up and down in women’s heads not one complete answer, but thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount to a whole one, just as in the differential calculus an infinite number of straight lines go to form a curved one. Some of these unripe, half-formed, fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were——
“He shouldn’t have changed his name, and he would have had his mother’s money by this time.”
“Of course, he might borrow.”
“Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won’t ask them to pay him.”
“He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide.”
“And he shouldn’t spend so much money.” “He needn’t have paid that half-term’s rent in advance.” For the latter would have kept him going for a day or two, you see!
It is always a vain task to oppose the “minority of one” of the complete and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial proofs of this sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of Switzerland, that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or valid one.[[41]] But the best way of confuting them is, to let them say what they have got to say, and not utter a word yourself; they’re certain to diverge, before very long, into subsidiary or accessory matters, which you yield to them, confuting them, as regards the real subject of argument, simply by action. This is the only species of confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs, unfortunately, attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to Lenette’s two principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore commenced as follows—
“Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like the rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart as firmly as your brooch. Now, I don’t go to a church, it’s true, but I have a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your immortal heart been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or was it only your pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for worms; and may not this miserable tin, which we have broken into little pieces and swallowed, have had a similar effect on the abominable worms of the heart? Collect yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his soup taste any the worse to him out of his painted iron saucière because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too? You sit behind that pincushion of yours, and can’t see that society is mad, and drinks coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups, and has particular kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the gardens—at least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince, or a grand master, I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark knives, snipe dishes and snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had a stag of eight upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and one gets up and preaches his false doctrine in it when another has done, just as they do in a Quaker meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veritable follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet to come—old follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of the nature of both.”
Lenette’s only reply was an inexpressibly gentle request: “Oh! please, Firmian, do not sell the pewter.”
“Very well, then, I shan’t!” (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose which he had so long had ready baited for it). “The emperor Antoninus sent his real silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send mine; but just as you like: I don’t care twopence. Not an ounce of it shall be old; I shall merely pawn! I’m much obliged to you for the suggestion; and if I only hit the eagle’s tail on St. Andrew’s Day, or the imperial globe, I can redeem the whole of it in a minute—I mean with the money of the prize; at all events, the salad-bowl and the soup-tureen. I think you’re quite right. Old Sabel’s in the house, is she not? She can take the things and bring back the money.”
She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew’s Day was her Fortunatus’s wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich—just as they are to catch the plague and other epidemics.
Siebenkæs—who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his household goods, but on the loss of his money—was secretly resolved to leave the trash at the pawnbroker’s, unredeemed for ever, like a state-bond, even though he should chance to be king (at the shooting-match), and convert the transaction into a regular sale some future day, when he happened to be passing the shop.
After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the risks attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was laid as a tax which must necessarily be paid upon every loaf of bread, Firmian had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to remember his jealousy. In Lenette’s case, matters were necessarily exactly reversed; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, it must grow faster on his money-dunghill than on the advocate’s field all over wells of hunger. The Schulrath’s eye was not one of those which read the troubles of a household in a minute, though they are masked by smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very reason it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour free from clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine, yet the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky. Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the bells on the jester’s cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish sallies. Lenette could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very least, and even Peltzstiefel didn’t understand him when he read him, but only when he heard him talk. The two men at first talked only of persons, not of things, as women do; only that they called their chronique scandaleuse by the name of History of Literature and Men of Letters. For literary men like to know every little trait and peculiarity of a great author—what clothes he wears, and what his favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely observe every little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens to pass through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted away, and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the downcast sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten altar-cloth of hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying beneath—that body which it has to drag and bear about, sighing under its weight. When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone reading-master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched—every nerve quivering under some instrument of torture—and a brother of his craft, plagued by just as many instruments of torture as himself, comes and argues and philosophises with him a whole evening, and tells him all the latest opinions of the literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks the hours of the torture[[42]] is laid on its side—Orpheus comes, all bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish from their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful curls, the Ixion’s wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two poor Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the music. But the poor curate’s, the reading-master’s, the scholar’s, good wife, what is her comfort in her misery? She has none except her husband, who ought, therefore, to be very tender to all her shortcomings.
The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank, with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the ‘Kuhschnappel Heavenly Messenger.’ He also took out of his pocket another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader will hail both these works with gladness, seeing that my hero and his has no money in the house, and will be able to live for a day or two by reviewing them. The second manuscript, which was in a roll, was entitled: ‘Lessingii, Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita et publice acta, moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.’
It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ have complained of the length of time which elapsed before this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the ‘Messenger’ and the ‘Universal German Library;’ for the latter, notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation, notices good works within a few years of their birth—sometimes even as early as the third year of their existence—so that the favourable notice can frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers of it not being worn out before. The reason, however, why the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ did not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of the year 1788, was, that it was not until five years after that date that it—first saw the light itself.
“Don’t you think,” said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to Peltzstiefel, “that if I’m going to write proper notices of Messrs. Frank and Steffens here, my wife should take care not to make a thundering noise, swishing away with her broom at my back?”
“That might really be a matter of very considerable importance,” said Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of the proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before him. Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel’s face, striving to read the Rubrum (the red title), and the Nigrum (the black body matter) of his judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours were there. But though Stiefel’s bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the deepest affection for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows—
“Madame Siebenkæs, this really won’t do at all; for God hath not created anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds of thousands of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of the globe, as if on school-forms before him, and to all of these he has to speak. Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to eradicate: ages, long since gone to dust and passed away, with those who lived in them, he has to describe with accuracy and minuteness; systems, the most profound and the most complex, he has to confute and overthrow, or otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has to pierce through massy crowns, through the Pope’s triple tiara, through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of laurel—to pierce them all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work; and this work he can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his faculties! What a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and a difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think what the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier still—I mean in the ‘Iliad’—and so with one after another, down to our own day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often scarcely known where they were, what they were doing, or what they would be at; that they were blind and dumb, and insensible to everything but what was perceived by the five interior spiritual senses, like blind people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking state are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness and strain it is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and Archimedes could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his meditation was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one Frenchman of a great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death of his wife.”
“There, you see,” said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her husband, “how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she’s at her washing and scrubbing?”
Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: “Now, a fire of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted calm. And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of letters in Paris live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other streets are all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor lives.”
“No TINMEN especially,” added Siebenkæs, very gravely. “It should always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than half-a-dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should make its appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of the previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or written down, takes its departure from the head altogether.”
Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she would always stand still, like Joshua’s sun, while Firmian was smiting the foe with pen and scourge.
“Haven’t I often asked the bookbinder myself,” she said, “not to hammer so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was making his.” However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went away contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of quieter times.
But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace, seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan hospital of an earth—how little will it help you in these dim labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, of which even the Ariadne clue-threads all turn to nets and snares? How long will the poor’s advocate manage to live on the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the price of the two reviews which he is going to write? Only, we are all like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the day of judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world. We sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future YONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future HERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.
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 OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER.
This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The wretched, leaky Danaid’s bucket which our good couple had to use for washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust—few and far between as they were—out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always run dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the outside. On this occasion, however, they had something certain to go upon, namely, the reviews of the two works; they could count upon four florins certainly, if not upon five.
Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which had hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From eight o’clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was engaged in holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme of Dr. Frank of Pavia, which was entitled: ‘Sermo Academicus de civis medici in republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis. Auct. Frank. 1785.’ He criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts from this little production, till he thought he had covered enough paper to earn what would suffice to redeem the pawned herring-dish, salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates—his views on the work occupying one sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.
The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in the afternoons he had done advocate’s work, not reviewer’s, appearing in the character of defendant (maker of defence), not of fiscal (prosecutor). He had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon girls and maid-servants came with bonnets and caps, and with mouths full of conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer in language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand words to express the same idea, these young women had a thousand idioms for it, or different ways of putting it;—and, as an organ when it’s out of order, immediately begins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as soon as you begin to work the bellows, though no notes may be pressed down, so would they the moment the bellows of their lungs was set a-going. He didn’t mind this, however, seeing that at the particular hours to which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his own juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the arguing of Lenette’s cases, went on with the arguing of his. He wasn’t disturbed by this; he maintained: “A lawyer is not to be put out, he can open and close his sentences when he chooses—his periods are long tapeworms, and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity—for each segment of them is itself a worm, each comma a period.”
But reviewing was another matter, and couldn’t be done so well. At the same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the unlearned (the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he actually did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the title of Steffen’s Latin translation of “Emilia Galotti,” and proceeded as follows—
“This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is, indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have as yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for their part, have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the Greek and Roman classic authors. The German nation can point to literary productions of its own which are quite worthy of perusal by scholars and by linguists, who, although they can translate them, do not understand them, because they are not written in Latin. Lichtenberg’s ‘Pocket Calendar’ has appeared simultaneously in a German edition—for the English, who are studying German—and in a French for our own haute noblesse. But why should not German original works, and even the very ‘Calendar’ itself, be made known to linguists and to scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin translation? There can be no doubt that they would be the very first to be struck by the great resemblance which may be traced between the odes of Ramler and those of Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer must confess that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to him that but two correct editions of Klopstock’s ‘Messiah’ have as yet appeared, the original edition and his own—and that there is no Latin edition of it for scholars—(Lessing having scarcely translated the ‘Invocation’ in his miscellaneous writings)—nor one in the curial style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor one in Jew-German for the Jewish community.”
When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid wouldn’t stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer said—
“I haven’t written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette, tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say, ‘It’s four o’clock,’ instead of ‘The four quarters to four have gone?’ Can no woman say, ‘The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,’ and then an end of the matter? Can no woman say, ‘I want a dollar for it,’ and there an end of the story? Nor, ‘Run in again to-morrow!’ and no more about it? Can you not do it, for instance?”
Lenette answered very coldly, “Oh! of course you think everybody thinks just as you think yourself!”
Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents—namely, curses—up skywards. The first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the passage. The second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as distinctly as man could, her first answer was, “What?” or, “What do you say?” Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a “second of exchange” of this sort when they are in any embarrassment for an answer, and I laud them for so doing; but in cases where what is required of them is attention, not the truth, this ancora and bis which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries—seeing that they occur much more frequently.
If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture, but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following
EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.
“The author of the work on ‘Marriage’ has said, ‘A woman who does not talk is a stupid woman.’ But it is easier to be his encomiast than his disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this statement, which has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond. Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary, such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.
“The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when she is working as when she is not.
“I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere may be purified by this perpetual flagellation—this oscillation of the leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[[43]] It would, however, be very wonderful had Nature—always economising her forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain—ordained this much longer oscillation, this seventy years’ wagging of the feminine tongue, to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up the atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics, and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature’s beneficent arrangement that it is exactly in the largest cities—and moreover in the winter—and moreover indoors—and in large assemblages—that women talk most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c., requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed, Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments; for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate those of America—who fill their mouths with water in order to keep silence—and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the free flow of feminine speech.
“I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature, must always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary foot-tracks and ends in view. Such persons might permit themselves the supposition (I should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of the female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the motion which it communicates to the atmosphere, may possibly serve to give typical illustration to some thought or idea of a spiritual nature—e. g. the female soul itself, perhaps.
“This belongs to that class of things with respect to which Kant has said that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should rather incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an indication of the cessation of thought and mental activity—as in a good mill the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues are attached to women’s heads in order to give due notice, by their clanging, that some contradiction, something irregular or impossible, is dominating in them.[[44]] Similarly, H. Müller’s calculating machine has a little bell in it, which rings merely to give notice that some error has occurred in a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural philosopher to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may prove to be erroneous.”
I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.
He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming to him as the price of the ideas should be enough to pay for new toes to his boots—Fecht asked a sheet and a half for doing the pair—but he had not time for this, as he was obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the compositor’s sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day.
The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not our whole life an equation, a sum in “partnership” between soul and body; and is not all action upon us corporeal, and all reaction from us spiritual?
The servant-girl brought back only “kind regards;” not the leaves of silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a hiatus; but it must be in a manuscript—not in his own or other people’s shoes, stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them from his view;—who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he enters into and renders his spiritual rôle, that the coarse daubs of landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box—and who does not wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.
But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye. But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand, put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to fill your honey-cells—an hour of judgment will strike at last for you, and ask you if ye were worthy to live, let alone to live a life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the trifling trouble of paying the poor who have undergone the immense trouble of earning. But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money—the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.
The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked again—he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it and getting up again.—I interrupt my period to observe en passant that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with Job-like lamentations.—He also took down from its hook an old yellow mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of it, moved the glass of it up and down a little and then hung it up again—an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made, according to the plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.
He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ——. But here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried, “Why not, indeed! But, please God, it shall not come to that with me!”
He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, “Oh! very well, it matters little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to take its departure.” By covering this bell of shame with his open hand by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper, without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all the time that she would rather pawn the garment of her soul (i. e. her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it—in this case the mortar—and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, “The fact is, that it’s very little that we have to pound in the course of a twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same time, just give me some idea why you’re so anxious to keep the checked gown—what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that’s a terrible sort of idea; I can’t stand it. Coin the dress into silver—eliminate it altogether; I’ll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again.”
She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all “careless, thoughtless householders;” and this for the very reason, that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house, and—goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. “I had rather starve,” she cried, “than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your reviews.”
“Now you begin to talk sense,” said he; and he carried the pestle horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to Lenette’s pillow—next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own. “If people should happen to hear it ring,” he said, “they would think I wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I shouldn’t like that.”
The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen and with the Job’s message, “There’s nothing left at the bakers’ shops at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler Fecht) couldn’t get any either.” This was lucky; the advocate could enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partnership funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily bankruptcies, answered—
“With all my heart. G—d d—n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a scrap of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but waxed-ends.” In short, this coalition of the tiers état with the learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to poverty are small weights, apothecaries’ measure, heller-loaves,[[45]] a dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the bargain); and a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family’s evening depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of half-an-ounce.
They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be pawned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put the mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkæs fired off various queries out of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew perfectly well that the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must march that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary Abzug-geld.[[46]] Women always like to put everything off till the very last possible moment.
Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural to expect that the first thing the editor of the ‘Heavenly Messenger’ would do would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at least be able to set before his editor a candlestick with a candle in it, and a beer-glass containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all the springs in the human machine. Siebenkæs wouldn’t let it trouble his head, because he knew Stiefel wouldn’t let it trouble his. But Lenette was to be pitied, inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened by her fondness for Stiefel! At last the Rath put his hand in his pocket. They thought now he was going to produce the review-money; but all he took out was his snuff-machine, his tobacco-grater, and he dived back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already. He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for another half-ounce. Truly—and here he swore an oath for which he would have incurred a fine had he been in England—he had sent, like an ass, not only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted out and neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches—they were his plush ones—to the tailor’s. He said it wasn’t the first time, and it was a lucky job that the tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he hadn’t noticed how much there was in his purse. He innocently requested Lenette to “send and get him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews.” Siebenkæs roguishly added, “And send for some beer at the same time, dear.” He and Stiefel looked out of window; but he saw that his poor wife—her bosom torn with sighs, and suffering peine forte et dure—stole into the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her apron.
After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for the inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the little altar-bell, which in this case, besides announcing a transubstantiation, or transformation of the substance of the bread, as it does in the Roman Catholic Church, had undergone one itself. Their blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and tranquilly along, by meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When he is in the depths of misery, the first happy moment lifts him out; when he is at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment, even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to earth. No great man, who has maîtres de cuisine, clerks of the cellar, capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true enjoyment of the pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and gives no thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf and his can, are united by a mutual bond of gratitude.
The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the medicine had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old, kind friend was leaving, Siebenkæs gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand. Her husband, as some little compensation to her for having pounded her little fit of obstinacy to groats in the mortar, said to her in an off-hand, cheerful manner, “You give him one, too.” The blushes mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had a mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she had not been obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have fled to her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with affectionate friendliness—something like a white winter-landscape in sunshine—waiting till—she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness of this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out of the way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still beaming as affectionately as ever, he said—
“Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkæs?”
Her husband said, “Surely you don’t expect my wife to give you the kiss. She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the candle!”
Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at the same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips on hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other half. Lenette gave him more space, by bending back her head; yet it must be said that while she held her left arm with the candle high up in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good deal to push away the Rath—another, more proximate, fire—politely with the other. When he was gone, she was still just the least bit embarrassed. She moved about with a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness was buoying her up with its wings—the evening red was still bright on her cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her eyes were bright, but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her—her smiles came before her words, and she spake very few—not the slightest allusion was made to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and looked out of the window at the sky two or three times. She didn’t seem to care to eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a glass or two of water. Anybody else—myself for example—would have held up his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a first kiss from her sweetheart.
And I shouldn’t have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an extraordinary piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have forgotten about his having contracted this little loan—little debts of two or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich people, who always carry less money about them than the poor, and therefore borrow from them, ought to inscribe trifling debts of this sort on a memorial tablet, in their brain, because it is very wrong to break into a poor devil’s purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for these groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe.
Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this manuscript if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely because our dear couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For the position of these people is really going on from bad to worse; the days of their destiny move with those of the calendar, from October on to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to the beginning of winter, and they find that moral frosts and nights get harder and longer in the same ratio with those of the season. However, I must go regularly on with my story.
I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a Novembriseur of the British, is the most horrible month of all the year—for me it is a regular Septembriseur. I wish I could hybernate, sleep, till the beginning of the Christmas month, December. The November of ’85 had, at the commencement of its reign, a dreadful wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal fistula; in fact it was unendurable. The northeast wind, which in summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past one’s ears, because one knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign of steady cold. To our couple the weathercock was really a funeral standard. Though they didn’t exactly go out to the woods themselves with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs, like the poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and it had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would burn. But this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate’s stoicism, after all, than even to his purse; he couldn’t run out and go up a hill, and look about him, and seek in the heavens for that which consoles and comforts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding nebulæ (Magellan’s clouds), if nothing else, gleaming through the fog-banks. For when he could go up the Rabenstein, or some other hill, he could get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments of this earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its fangs up to his hill. Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of life which stretches on into the invisible distance of infinity, near to the lofty heavens, the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like leeches, from our bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch our arms—no fetters on them now, though sore and marked, and bruised with the galling iron—we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure bright æther; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom the peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible eternal Father, like children hastening home to Him—and we open them wider yet to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, “Oh take not this solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again among the fog and the sorrow.” And why is it that prisoners and the sick are so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their holes, the clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far away in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can be seen shining with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this wretched weather though Siebenkæs could not enjoy the consolations of imagination, which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the window-sills. His chief consolation, which I commend to everybody, was this: Man is under the pressure of a necessity of two kinds—an every-day necessity, which, everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent necessity, which is only submitted to after struggles and complaints. The daily and everlastingly recurrent necessity is this—that corn does not ripen in winter—that we have not got wings, though so many lower creatures have them—or that we cannot go and stand upon the ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and looking down into the abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the marvellous and beautiful effects of the setting sun’s rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent, necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in blossom—that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and the daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless to murmur because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings. All the PAST—and this alone is the subject of our sorrow—is of so iron a necessity that in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just as senseless of an apothecary to mourn because his shop is burnt to the ground as to sigh because he can’t go botanising in the moon, although there may be many things in the phials there which he has not got in his.
I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to be consoled, let him seek consolation in this—
EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.
A time may, that is to say, must come when it shall be held to be a moral obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to cease to torment ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall wipe away the greater part of our tears, even here on earth, were it only from proper pride.
It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise man can scarcely ever wholly lay aside his body’s garb of mourning; but let his soul wear none! For if it is a simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason which enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally valid for the forgiveness of the greatest.
What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties.
We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul’s deep mourning garb into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, “I am content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not relieved me; but for her it would have been greater—the gnat’s sting would have been a wasp’s.”
It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the incorporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our delusive conviction that it will last for ever.
We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves, “Very well—if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty years’ time,—I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty hours?”
When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, then also, say, “The island was but a dream”? Why am I more inconsolable for the loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what constitutes the distinction),—and why does man think a great loss less necessary and less probable than a small?
The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing, demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of being vexed because it’s past twelve o’clock, or because it’s not past, but only just twelve o’clock. What nonsense! The passion wants besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its own,—a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let his passions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!
When I was reading in Widman’s ‘Höfer Chronik’ the account of the fearful, bloody times of the thirty years’ war, and, as it were, lived them over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their days—and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes dashing against them; and then, when I thought “All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs”—I was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for all times, and I asked, “Was, and is, then, this passing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly lamentation?” Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.
A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the theologians would have it—it should make us proud. When the long, heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn and bleeding—or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders and dust—then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which they fall, and let it say—
“Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to thee, thou torn and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth—the ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form from vapour by convulsion—the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful dream—I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death.”
But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to thyself this question, “If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust against Him, and say, ‘Almighty, be other than thou art!’”
But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps these tears differ not.
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.
The St. Andrew’s shooting-match will take place in the seventh chapter: the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that period—that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence, read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and said, “If I am quite happy, why should you be pitying me?” The articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to Lenette a substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom her to the idea. It was the “Censeo Carthaginem delendam” (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used to say daily in the senate after every speech.
Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare’s arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs had the wisdom to say, before they went away, “Censeo Carthaginem delendam,” i. e. “Wouldn’t it be better to pawn the checked calico?”
They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.
And then the process of alchemical transmutation of metals was applied to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted into table-money. Of course he previously said “Censeo.” It is scarcely worth the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was born by this branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a fruit-bearing one.
The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely have served as their nourishing milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been attended by seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of them), who went “into the bargain,” but for whom the woman at the shop added some melted butter. Wherefore he said “Censeo.” Many of my readers must remember my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was distributing sentences of death among the furniture, he did not take very much notice of certain table-napkins which were lying beside the checked calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed them out all but a few. When they were gone, he remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly before Martinmas Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore, though it was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was nothing for it to press.
“If such a thing should be necessary,” he said, “the press might very well get leave of absence on private affairs, until we get through the smoothing-press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and come out all smooth and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins into our button-holes on their return.” His first intention had even been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put the press in the van of it as avant-courier of the napkins, and in that event he would only have had to invert his syllogism (as well as his procession) in this way: “I don’t see what we can do with the napkins, or how we’re to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the press home again.”
I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkæs, and his Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything—that is, clasped her hands above her head, and said, “Oh! the thoughtless, silly creature! he’ll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful furniture!”
Firmian’s constant answer was—
“You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in lamentation, like a Jew—my coat, which is torn already and pull my hair out by the roots—that hair, which terror frequently causes to fall off in a single night. Isn’t it enough if you do the howling? Are you not my appointed præfica and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig’s bristles,[[47]] that if it is the will of God, who has given me so light and merry a heart—if it be His will that I am to go about the town with eight thousand holes in my coat, and without a sole to either shoe or stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer and poorer” (here his eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), “may the devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail if I leave off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell him to his face, is an ass. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs—never such a thing as a shirt—and shall a creature such as I let a hair of him turn grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times such as these?”
Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of the big clothes-moths about you—the human furniture-boring worms. And ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me—whether ye be sitting in colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps haven’t got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most certainly haven’t got a black one—rise above the effeminate surroundings of your times to the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein it was thought no disgrace to a noble human creature to have neither clothes nor temple, like the statue of Hercules; take heed only that your soul shares not the poverty of your outward circumstances; lift your faces to heaven with pride—a sickly faint northern Aurora is veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the thin blood-red storm!
It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew’s Day shooting-match, which was Lenette’s consolation in all her troubles, and to which all her wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was something worse than melancholy—inconsolable.
This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed Lenette’s Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but nobody in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole anchor of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal (in the shape of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his Noah’s ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more strictly than ever he did his word. He said he would see about it to-morrow.
Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were, farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their worship, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can’t obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack—as they have been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and Bavaria—or in newspapers—or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of our festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it, the feast of the Jewish Circumcision; and consequently hereafter, when the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won’t take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity, however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel disposed—to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.
And yet I think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter, when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden—as no animal may be degraded by working on the “Schabbes”[[48]] (Sabbath)—and perform the necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they will, therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes as they became due.
I return to our poor’s advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette’s grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the most ascetic philosophers—caring, indeed, more about the latter themselves than about the former—are at the same time not to be controlled if they have to go without certain chronological articles of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter, the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take, not for the palate’s sake, but “by reason of the ordinance.” Antoninus and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient substitute for the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said, “We really are Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table to-day—I’m sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you, you believe in nothing.” Whether he believed in anything or not, however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words, “It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn’t read it himself, especially as even if it had had points, he couldn’t have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here”—he said, producing it from under his coat-tails “I should be very glad if you would allow me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home; I don’t quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I don’t mind if it’s as thin as a whipping-post. If you like, you may call it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for all I care; it’ll make no difference to me. If I should ever come and take away the press again, it’ll be an easy matter, and it’ll be time enough, to go into the transaction afresh.”
It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her religious observances, he brought in this goose of controversy, which seemed to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed, another Schmalkaldian article, a commercial one—cold iron, namely—has often been employed in defence of the articles of theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire of an auto-da-fé.
But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom he was delighted to see generally, though not to-day, for on the day before, Michaelmas, the quarter’s house rent was due, as we may remember. The Friseur presented himself as a sort of mute bill “at sight;” yet he was polite enough not to ask for anything. He merely mentioned, in a casual manner, that “there was going to be an auction of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew’s Day, and in case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier.”
He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud, expression to her woes, saying he had “dunned them now, and that the whole house must know all about their disreputable style of housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?” It was incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the Friseur that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with these execrable eructations of human vanity in his noblest parts.
The path from hence to St. Andrew’s Day, all bordered with nothing but thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader, than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept getting more and more like a jardin Anglais, where only prickly and barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.
Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, “Only twenty (or nineteen, or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match.” But the hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house, and who kept saying to himself, “Do you know, I’m really curious to see what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out of this difficulty now—” Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture—a long cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). “We haven’t a cask, and we haven’t a baby,” he said. But his wife implored him, for heaven’s sake, “not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon” (she said) “are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly, or out from under one’s apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see them.”
And yet something must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet sorrowful way, “It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[[49]] is beating on the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we have got to eat off the drum.”
“Anything,” she said, faint and beaten, “except things that stick out so.” She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, “Rather take this!” and neither smiled nor wept! He had often looked at it; but as he had sent it to her himself last New Year’s Day, the day of their betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose, two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this pretty relic—this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient, resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old flowers tore his heart in two. “Lenette!” he said, moved beyond expression—“why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!”
“Well, who’s to be any the wiser,” she said, quite cheerfully and quite coolly. “You see they’re not so big as other things are.”
“Have you forgotten, then quite,” he stammered, “what I told you these flowers meant?”
“Let me see,” the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of her memory, “the forget-me-nots mean that I’m not to forget you, and that you won’t forget me—the buds mean happiness—no, no, the buds mean happiness that’s not quite all come yet—and the white rose—I don’t recollect now what the white rose means——”
“It means pain” (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), “and innocence, and sorrow, and a poor white face.” He clasped her in his arms, as the tears came to his eyes, and cried, “Oh! poor darling! poor darling! What can I do? It’s all beyond me! I should like to give you everything the world contains, and I have nothing——”
He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear, gentle eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her petition in the old tone saying, “I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn’t I? We shall get more money for the flowers.” What he said was, “Lenette! Oh, darling Lenette,” over and over again, each time more tenderly.
“But why not?” she asked, more gently each time, for she didn’t understand him in the least. “I had sooner pawn the coat off my back,” was his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that what he was driving at was the calico gown, and as this put her into a great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against all pledging of large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her previous coldness had been thoroughly genuine, and not assumed, he knew, alas! the very worst, a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy could avail to alleviate, namely—she either loved him no longer, or, she had never really loved him at all.
The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his arms which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of this his (spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but—“Whatever you please, dear; it’s all the same to me now.”
Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow up the bitter speech with these quiet words: “Put up your marriage wreath along with the other flowers, there’ll be a little more weight, and a little more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty work as my flowers.”
“My marriage wreath?” cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two bitter tears burst from her eyes. “No, that I positively shall NOT let go, it shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear mother’s was. Did you not take it up in your hand from the table on my wedding-day, when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say you thought quite as much of it as you did of the marriage ceremony itself, if not more? (I noticed what you said very carefully, and remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your wife, at all events, and I shall never let that wreath go as long as I live.”
His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he masked this behind the question, “What made you come back in such a hurry?” It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder’s, it seemed, and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to see what new books the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder’s, and in what sort of pretty bindings, partly to stick up his leg with its riding boot upon the cobbler’s bench and get him to stitch a top tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process. The world—(which expression can only mean the collection of female tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel)—may undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the latter being a feminine Volière to him; but I want proofs of this. Lenette, however, didn’t trouble herself about any proofs, but piously fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.
I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian’s compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give admission to a considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath, and had endured the Venner for so short a time. “She is faithful, at all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don’t really believe she is a bit cool, either, after all.” So that he was quite pleased that she should have her way (which was his also) about keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart. Besides which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let her have that other way of hers, though less willingly—this being a proceeding which hurt his feelings only, not hers. His old flower keepsake was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who rejoiced in the title of “Appraiser,” on the solemn understanding that it was to be redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from the bird-pole on St. Andrew’s Day.
The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to the Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November, 1785) was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be in his place in front of the bird-pole.
It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen to a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after him, but I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.
The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape of pawning, since the affair of the flowers. The reason was—there was nothing more to which he could refer his wife. At first, he used to refer her to the shooting-match; but when the mortar and the chair had evacuated the fortress without tuck of drum, they not being articles of a sort to be obtained as prizes for shooting, he took to referring her to public auctions at which he could always buy what he might require at about half price. Finally, though still referring her to auctions, he did so no longer with a view to import, but to export, trade—as a seller, rather than as a buyer, of commodities; in which respect he surpasses Spain.
He who has risen victorious over great and serious attacks of an insulting or offensive nature, has often had to yield to very small and trifling ones; and so it is with our troubles. The stout, firm heart, which has beat strongly on all through long years of bitter trial and affliction, will often break at once, like over-flooded ice, at some lightest touch of Fortune’s foot. Till now, Siebenkæs had carried himself erect, and borne his burden without a bend, ay, and with a merrier heart than many a man. Up to this hour, he really hadn’t minded the whole affair one single button. Had he not (merely to mention one or two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes, he was better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) had nothing to put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, but a frightful old cast-off robe of Charles the Great’s, not much better than Rabelais’s old gown, though that was not by several centuries so old as the Imperial one? And once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading perennial clothes flora, he told her all she had to do was to suppose he was serving in the new world with a thousand or so of other Anspach men, and the ship which was bringing out their new uniforms had been captured by the enemy, so that the whole force had nothing to put on but what they would have preferred to have been able to take off. Likewise that what he had had to go upon, and to take his stand upon for a considerable time past, had been something much superior to his own pair of boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy); as for his boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been shoved in like pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they had become a pair of fair halt-boots; just as the German corpora, also, by the influence of long years of civilisation and culture, have got considerably taken in, the long rifle having been docked into a short, or non-commissioned officers’ rifle.
But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far too much scared at the sight of one single bird of prey and of ill omen, flying athwart the lonely Sahara desert in which his life was passing. He himself was taken by surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything else but alarm under the circumstances. For as it had hitherto been his custom to prepare himself for dark and tragic scenes by comedy rehearsals of them—by which I mean, that he carefully read up, beforehand, all the legal steps which Herr von Blaise could take against him, thus taking up, in sport, and in advance, the burdens which the future had in store—it astonished him greatly to find that an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly foreseen, should prove to have longer thorns, when it came up towards him out of the future, than it seemed to possess while still at a distance.
So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the Inheritance Office came, with the long-expected THIRD dilatory plea of the Heimlicher, and with the third affirmatory decree written on the face thereof, as his breast was in the condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it) before his coming, his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, when this fresh stroke of the air-pump exhausted the receiver even more thoroughly than it had been emptied before.
Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my duty to report to the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all mention of the second of Mr. Blaise’s dilatory pleas, because I thought I might assume that every reader who has had as much as half a ship’s pound weight of legal documents through his hands—or one single settlement of law accounts—would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the first petition for delay would infallibly be followed by a second. It reflects much discredit on our administration of justice that every upright, honourable counsel finds himself compelled to adduce such a number of reasons (I wish I might say “lies”) before he can be accorded the smallest, necessary term of delay; he has got to say his children and his wife are dying; that he has met with all kinds of unfortunate accidents, and has thousands of things to do, journeys to make, and sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be quite enough for him to say that the preparation of the innumerable petitions for delay with which he is overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People ought to notice that these petitions for delay tend, as all other petitions do, to the protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of a watch work together to retard the principal wheel. A slow pulse is a sign of longevity not only in human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to me that an advocate who has any conscience is glad to do what he can to promote the length of life in his opponent’s suit—not in his own client’s, he would make an end of that in a minute if he could—partly to punish the said opponent, partly to terrify him, or else to snatch, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing as to which nobody can form an idea whether it is likely or not)—for as many years as possible; just as in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ the people who had a black mark on their brow were doomed to the torture of eternal life. The object of the man of business on the opposite side is a similar prolongation of the war to his opponents, and thus the two counsel immesh the two clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c., each with the best possible intentions. On the whole, lawyers are not so indifferent to the question, “What is the law?” as to the question, “What is justice?” For which reason they prefer arguing to writing; as Simonides, when he was asked by the king the question, “What is God?” begged for a day to consider his answer—then for another day—then for another—and for another, and always for another, because no man’s life is sufficient to answer that question—so the jurist, when he is asked, “What is justice?” keeps continually asking for more and more delays—he can never reply to the question—indeed, if the judges and clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to writing replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is anything unusual about it.
I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth. The vapours about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the morning mist to evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. “Many a poor devil has more to do than he can manage,” he said. If he had had a pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said this; but one such as his, who painfully trailed her cross (instead of taking it up), and was all lamentations—an elegiac poetess, a Job’s comforter—was herself a second cross to bear.
He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough left to buy the next year’s almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills (for his satires used up Lenette’s feather dusters much more than his own energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel’s red pipe-stalk into a pen); he would have been delighted to convert his plates into something to eat (there were none left, however), following the example of the Gauls, who used round pieces of bread as plates first, and afterwards as dessert; or of the Huns, who, after riding upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked, dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to be new fronted, and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the impending shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the performance of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.
When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his heart from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began catechising himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was that he was tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to go to the shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and without having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! “Is that really all?” he said. “And what, if you please, is there to make it a compulsory matter that I should go there at all? I’ll tell you what it is” (he went on to himself), “I am the monkey complaining bitterly that, having stuck his hand into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and filled it, he can’t pull it out without a corkscrew. All I’ve got to do is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all I’ve got to do is to open my hand and draw it out empty.” So he made up his mind to take his rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to sale.
All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed, with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he consoled himself all day long. “There is this blessed property about night,” he said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level, “that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about candles, coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A poor fellow is in peace and comfort as long as he is lying down: and, luckily, he has only got to stand for half of his time.”
The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when the patient is placed in a horizontal position.
Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning from his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and gun-loader to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and, using it as a lever, prised up the lid with its roots, i. e. nails; and the first thing he saw in it was a leather arm, which “gave him quite a turn;” for he had had many a good thrashing from that arm in bygone days.
It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on this subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs’s father on his body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since the time when he had lost his natural arm in the military service of the before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader wore this auxiliary arm fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it being more like the arm of a Hussar’s pelisse, or an elongated glove, worn by way of ornament, than as a mouth Christian of an arm (pretending to be what it was not). In the education of his children, however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the purpose of a school library and Bible Society, and was the collaborateur of the fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings—for instance, when Firmian made a mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate gunpowder, or broke a pipe—were punished not severely, that is, only with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the nourishing juice of knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire winter-schools are harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But there were two other sorts of transgressions which he punished more severely. When one of the children laughed at table during meals, or hesitated, or made a blunder during the long table-grace or evening prayers, he would immediately amputate his adventitious arm with his natural one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little darling.
Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour at dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to laugh while the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn even at this day. I can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers who try the expedient of unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and smiting a pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between the temporal and spiritual arms; but this mode of punishment ought to be invariably the one made use of; for there is nothing which infuriates children more than anything new in the way of instruments of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in general use. A child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not be set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one accustomed to the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-pieces had once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any recollection of lickings of the ordinary sort.
Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest; but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help, indeed! At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter boots, and eat whatever he liked for some days to come. What most astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily explicable, however) is that he had never thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his father was a Jäger; while, on the other hand, I must confess it could not have happened on a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the day of the auction.
The hunting spear, the horse’s tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the couteau de chasse, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil—a collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in the chest—could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up to auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.
It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the box—which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the rifle and the leathern artery were kept back—to hear what would be offered for the things.
He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer’s table, close to his hectic landlord. The sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels all heaped up higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were raging, and it had been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were the plunder of some captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the most part, by people on the downward path to poverty, and bought by those who had arrived at poverty already—had the effect of making him contemn and despise more every moment all this complex pumping apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of a few petty, feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he himself, the engineer and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of manliness grow stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had seemed yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.
Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more utterly indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and worldly position, than our being in any manner compelled to fall back upon the honour due to ourselves (independently of our chance position), our own intrinsic worth, our being compelled to tar over our inner being with philosophy (as if it were a Diogenes’ tub), by way of protection against injuries from without; or (in a prettier metaphor) when, like pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls of maxims to fill the holes which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. Now pearls are better than uninjured mother-of-pearl; an idea which I should like to have written in letters of gold.
I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has to follow with all this philosophy, because I want to get the reader into such a frame of mind that he may not make too great a fuss about what the advocate is going to do now: it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As the be-powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted to wheezing and coughing than to shouting, he took the auction-hammer from this hammer-man and sold off the things himself. True, he only did it for about half an hour, and only auctioned his own things; and even then he would have thought twice about taking the hammer in hand and setting to work, if it hadn’t been such an indescribable delight to him to hold up the horse’s tail, the spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and hammer on the table and cry, “Four groschen for the horse’s tail, once! five kreuzer for the decoy, twice!—going! Half-a dollar for the fox-trap, once! two gulden for this fine foil, twice! two gulden—going—going—and gone!” He did what it is an auctioneer’s duty to do, he praised the goods. He turned the horse’s tail over and over, and opened it out before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the shooting-match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion does vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and said there was enough of it to make snares for all the blackbirds in the Black Forest. He held up the decoy-bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company its wooden beak, its wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there were a hawk present, that he might bait the decoy and lure it.
The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on account of the wretchedness of my memory, I have had to refer to twice, show that the sum received from the huntsmen amounted to seven florins and some groschen. This does not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked mask; for nobody would have anything to say to them. When he went home he poured the whole of this crown-treasure and sinking-fund into Lenette’s gold satchel, taking occasion to warn her and himself of the dangers of great riches, and holding up to both the example of those who are arrogant by reason of wealth, and must therefore of necessity, sooner or later, come to ruin.
In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence immediately, I shall at length be able, after all these thousands of domestic worries and miseries, to conduct the learned world of Germany to the shooting-ground and present to them my hero as a worthy member of the shooting-club, with a rifle and bullets, and properly and respectably—well, booted, more than attired for his bullets are cast, his rifle cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes, Fecht having stitched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to half-boots, and soled them with the—leather arm, of which enough has been said already.
CHAPTER VII.
THE SHOOTING-MATCH—ROSA’S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN—CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.
There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a Catel’s pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel’s pedometer on, and had already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the diameter of Hof. “You see, in a moment,” I said, “how I am situated. The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps, besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am afraid it’s quite impossible that I can have the pleasure of——” However, this only made her the more determined that I should, and I was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn’t stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn’t twist myself down low enough to see the dial)—read them off for me twice—firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her house—so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young lady’s company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept; and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady’s company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.
St. Andrew’s Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was tolerably warm, and there wasn’t as much snow in the furrows as would have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings, and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought struck him, “That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette’s coming weeks, and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into that black form, nothing left of her but her WINGS and BALL.”
On St. Andrew’s morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses, and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she said, “May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with your rifle.” She asked several times if there was nothing he had forgotten—his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; “And mind you don’t get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern,” was her parting counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most anxiously, “For God’s sake, mind and don’t shoot yourself; my blood will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!”
At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner represented the serpent’s crest, and the standard-bearer’s coat was like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The auctioneering hairdresser—the only member of the lower ten thousand who rejoiced in a powdered head—tripped along, keeping the white peak of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when, with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of all these ignes-fatui—or, in a word, as master of the shooters’ lodge. Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in the procession—happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice, indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and, like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.
I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew’s shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however, he went on with his reviewing.
Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf—when the eagle hung in his heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future’s armorial bearings—when the wind instruments, which the troop of “wandering minstrels” had scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself, “The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all our heads, and how a mere unbroken faded flower-wreath of pleasant trifles, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the plants that are growing in it.”
Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune, thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down—to say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our hero’s head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of the crown itself.
At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements made for “running shooting” (as it is called) being carried on by those who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can load and aim at something of a less lofty kind—for instance, a Capuchin general. The “running” or “swing” shooting, as carried out at Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet through one of these paintings obtains the original—just as princes choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man’s image in order to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector, but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned, holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon—that is to say, a European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate of the amount of truth contained in another rumour—which I contradicted in the first hour of its existence—namely, that the Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version of another story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recently lied to me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the ‘Literary Gazette’ of December last, but Government declined to pay the expense of the insertion.
However, although those who occupied themselves with the “swing” shooting did only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting was every bit as important a business as the shooting at the standing mark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha—which heart, however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch—so that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his skill and nerve. The cardinal’s hat was easier of attainment, for which reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the oculist who should succeed in inserting new (leaden) pupils into the cardinal’s eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone’s while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal’s feet rested upon a fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment—whatever the imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it—to record, with the utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.
The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune chucked him the cardinal’s hat to make up for it—the cardinal’s hat with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle’s head, and from the general’s too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate, out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that either.
Now the prize-lists—which are correct, seeing that they were made out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von Blaise—state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak, and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.
The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very very glad, for his dear little wife’s sake (waiting for him now, as she was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the eagle’s talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his rifle.
All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst—the most to be dreaded of all—his own predecessor and landlord. He aimed, and shot—and the gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired—and the eel-spear came tumbling down.
Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their little fanfares far oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the infantas—I mean all the children—began a race for the sceptre, but the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one hand, holding in the other his own emblem of sovereignty, the whip.
Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber—the little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard, and applied to himself):—
“A very pretty little frog-shooter! It ought, by rights, to be a honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from their stomachs, not from, their combs. A truly preposterous and absurd implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a shepherd’s crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched—one of those shepherd’s staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep’s fat out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!”
He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the sake of jesting; and couldn’t imagine what made people vexed with him, and why it was that he couldn’t have his little bit of fun with them as well as any one else.
He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and said to Lenette, “There’s a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in one!” the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler’s “knight’s move” on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain, within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what she could do, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely, that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the bookseller’s wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments—a man who didn’t half threaten people. “What I tell you,” repeated the sceptre-bearer, “is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!” and he banged his sceptre-knout in indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She answered at last, “Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told me all about that; I am so glad about it, but I should quite think you will shoot a good many more things yet—will you not? I said so to the bookseller’s wife.”
She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian thought, “She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under his arm, and a sceptre or so.” It was just the same with the wife of the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.
How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you laden with good news, or with presents—that at the very moment when Fate brightens the wine of your joy into “bloom,” your vats grow turbid with the lees of the old liquor? Comes it from your custom of showing only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart too full and the tongue too hard to move?
I believe it is often from all these causes combined.
In men, again—sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a thousand—it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps, from a deeper question still. Is not our heart’s inward bliss but an olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge foaming and seething all round us—an olive-leaf which she has culled for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit, is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us something beyond peace—namely, hope?
Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance, makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three times running—(although what ought to be anticipated is the very reverse)—or reckons upon hitting the eagle’s talon became it has knocked the sceptre out of it—this heart of man, uncontrollable alike in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the shooters’ trench.
He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or hands of the general of the Capuchins—these algebraic exponents or heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork—aimed he alike in vain.
It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms—a silver eagle in a bloody field—were to be set up on a throne or a bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.
Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his aim—eager to cull this forbidden fruit—a Ribstone pippin and football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be gained along with it—’twas honour alone that fired his heart—he pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the opposite direction. Rosa—this particular apple being too high out of his reach—went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was, that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a very clever man, and, ere long, such a nice-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.
Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be fruit-gatherers—about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to the eleventh—and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person. There were few among the seventy who didn’t wish this accursed gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[[50]] The hairdresser fired, struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with the imperial globe in the talons.
His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all, but at the eagle’s tail, so as simply to shake the apple down.
In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond all description.
Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck—for the warm burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of the distant storm. “Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy Fortune,” thought he, “and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all positions—perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet—to see if it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it shall!”
He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief chain of syllogisms:—“What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor’s globe is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours—the core of each is a handful of earth—and this emperor’s globe of mine, again, is a miniature emblem of a real emperor’s, with even less of earth—none at all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at enjoyment!” Most of man’s pleasures are but preparations for pleasure; he thinks he has attained his ends, when he has merely got hold of his means to those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years. Each of these mirrors reflects that sun’s image less brightly—more faint and pale—upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon us all frozen, and is become a moon.
He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip, during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance going on, and then cast himself back into the mêlée. As his number was a next-door neighbour to Rosa’s, and they had, consequently, their holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for him under (if not in) a lady’s window; just as an experienced gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.
Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got to his wife’s door, he there assumed the rôle of Knecht Ruprecht (the children’s “Bogie,” who, on St. Andrew’s Day, bestows upon them, for the first time in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same), and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought not to record such little trifles.
As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, “This time to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just recall this important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we’re going to bed!” When he got up in the morning he said, “Very likely this is the last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a crown.”
He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the time came. But it was only as long as he did not see the eagle that his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was, therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon, whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for his number-neighbour’s; the proposal was, “we go shares in gains and in losses—in the bird and in the cardinal.” This copartnership doubled the advocate’s hopes by the process of halving them.
But these companions in arms didn’t bring down a single painted splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.
At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid’s dart right through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he couldn’t hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this pig—this polypus in the heart of the Babylonian fille de joie. All that was left of the bird was its torso, which stuck to its perch like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown would so fain have dissolved.
A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm, emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern, who had gone off, and—seeing what a state of excitement everybody was in, especially our hero—marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking that he had a better chance of becoming, in that quarter, king of a queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen. However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs’ chamber after him presently.
Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the present century had the devil often enough in their pens—in their denials or in their assertions of him—but the Kuhschnappelers had him far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.
Seneca, in his ‘Remedies for Anger,’ has omitted the simplest of all, the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted, malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, does contain the devil’s name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word Abracadabra, spoken diminuendo, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation—a mild case of simple anger—“the devil,” or perhaps “hell and the devil,” will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever of rage I should be disposed to prescribe “the devil and his infernal grandmother:” strengthening the dose, moreover, with a “donnerwetter” or two, and a few “sacraments,” as the curative powers of the electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be “taken and torn by all the devils in hell.” But what I would fain render clear is that, in all these remedies, the real specific is the devil; for as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured by the application of scorpions in powder.
The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this—as also in the chase and in agricultural operations—the aristocracy forget what they are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two, unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play. Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours (mankind’s natural theatre), the chorus, i. e. the people, has been gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists (ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud—what was the chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra, and before the stage where the great “business” is going on.
By this time it was past two o’clock, and the afternoons were brief; yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle. “The devil and his infernal grandmother!” cried he, when he had fired his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, “Ten thousand devils!” doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.
They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier numbers didn’t even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of powder into their pans.
Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid, earthy blood—for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible—or, rather, all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.
“This bird,” thought Firmian, “is the decoy of all these men, and the money is what baits the lure.” But he himself had three reasons for desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of the Saxon.
The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.
No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs transform wood into iron).
The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso—ay, or even the perch of it—nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff—to send the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder—aimed for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)—and pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all their trumpets ready at their lips—trumpets horizontal, music perpendicular—the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton; the buffoon in his excitement couldn’t think of a joke to make—his ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again ’twas but a flash in the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at the least, away over the bird.
He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that his co-partner might, by heaven’s grace, capture the feathered game.
Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air, like Fortune’s wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching down.
As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.
The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle’s body, holding it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying, “Vive le roi,” and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain; and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but fuller of emotion.
And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gains chez Madame Siebenkæs (while her husband is thus ascending his)—a richer throne, or only a pillory—and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the two it may prove to be.
Rosa knocked at Lenette’s door, and straightway entered in at it, in order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who was there. “He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His rifle had once more been excessively fortunate.” It was with these truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing, however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever. Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table, took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. “Why, these are No. 8’s,” he said; “these pins are a great deal too large, Madame; their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me.”
He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, “Look how badly this is plated; ’twill spoil every stitch you take with it.” He threw it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other than such as were “badly plated”), and stick the contents of his own needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, “Don’t trouble yourself.”
“I really wish your husband would come,” he said, looking at his watch. “The king’s shot must be over long ere this time.”
He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern), he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the Augurs, always strove to carry off the heart of the sacrifice—he, whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as often as he lost it (as a lizard’s tail does)—he had the word “heart,” which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of it in his hand.
My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness, delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters relating to love of the opposite sex.
He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she imparted—prescription fashion—in all their fulness, both of words and of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying, he had been most anxious for her husband’s homecoming because of a certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise. “I shall come another day,” he said; “but the most important point of the affair I can mention to yourself,” and he sat down before her, with his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital, however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)
“She might readily see,” he said, “that it referred to that wretched lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor’s advocate did not deserve, indeed, that a man should interest himself in his favour; but then, you see, he had an admirable wife, who did deserve it.” (He italicised the word “admirable” by means of a hurried squeeze of her hand.) “He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer his ‘no’ three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr. Leibgeber’s (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a stove-statue at the Heimlicher’s, nothing approximating to a yielding, or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what an unhappy condition her (Lenette’s) household matters had been placed in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require for current expenditure. As yet she did not know him in the slightest degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel—though he could produce documentary evidence if she liked,” and he did produce and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did (when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.
But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the Heimlicher’s hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband’s own, such as in his social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before. “Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to do is to ask for it.”
Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. “She reads too much, and doesn’t work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons from you in housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of action.” Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks—the close arrest—of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr. Everard’s longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether. Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its seeds.
Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the smaller sort.
In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs enough in his breast, he asked her if she had any idea what was causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged him, and he said, “It is the fact that you have not such a happy lot as you deserve.”
Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor, anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for all the long, long past.
But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty, and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.
Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier between them. A dance, or some joyful tumult of the senses would have brought him further with this commonplace, every-day, honest, and upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down into her lap.
But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an historian—seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless Everard—not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind’s eye firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance or in retreat.
And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner’s work) teaches them that in former times the penalty for touching a woman’s hand was the same as for hewing off a man’s middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet’s ‘Introduction to the History of Denmark,’ that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves (since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge them—not, it is true, to be banished from their chambers, but to remain in them; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same) in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.
When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it, and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms—But at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress, and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and outmanœuvre him—just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they may fight the better up in the citadel.
My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire—have taken her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard’s attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous (considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was), much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the Schulrath’s highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her head.
Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two. A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said, “Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’”—from the crossroad between love and hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump—into his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, “There!” he cried, “take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything further!” If she had taken it, he would immediately have wanted something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing the flowers right over the table, he cried, “Why, they are your own pawned flowers—I redeemed them myself—so take them you must.” On which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow, which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously returned.
She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety, closely bordering upon terror, assumed the rôle of comforter and spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere parenthetical manner as he dashed by, “Madame the queen!” for his great idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on the spot, and without a moment’s delay, make proclamation of the kingship and queenship of four persons.
There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had descended (in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser’s wife, one of that common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all the year round—for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked—and commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class, and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.
Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the religious, the immoral—every sort, in fact; he was always ready with the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste, inculcating upon them a greater universality of it—a greater power of appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations belonging—so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste for the live beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it, but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed. There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the wigmaker’s wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been always combing at wigs in the bookbinder’s on the occasions when the Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his entrée into the childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing—no window, no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard, and the couple’s bed.
When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden, however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution; Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling into the sanctum sanctorum, while Sophia placed herself at the door of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying, “She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet.” Gladness and hurried draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called “Madame Siebenkæs” up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or it may have been, perhaps, another fruit which joy commonly bears, namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the question, “Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?”
“What! was he in my room just now?” cried he, while his wife echoed, unbidden, from the door, “Has he been in the house?” “He was here, upstairs,” Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, “and he hasn’t gone out yet.”
The hairdresser’s suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. “Things are not all exactly as they should be here, Sophy,” said he to his wife. The passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where Rosa’s sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this Ariadne’s thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went. Here among the flowers lay the serpent—as, according to Pliny, sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself in the nethermost of Dante’s hells, though in fact and reality she was there already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils; consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner. What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this searcher of his, into more places than one—firstly, into the bed, next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However, all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; the friseur pressed the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.
The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!
He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient, though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements; however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up, to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: “I know you are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there’s nobody here but me, as yet (there’ll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my tongs and let you out.” Laying his ear close to the door of this Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.
“Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman,” said the wigmaker; “I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I’ll call the whole house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a shilling or two, and give me your custom.”
At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, “I am in here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I’ll do all you say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door.” The wigmaker and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the “parloir” of this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith’s fee; at last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued from Jove’s cranium into the light of day, “The landlord,” said Fecht, “couldn’t have managed the job without me.”
Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of them and of the locksmith’s arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark. The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed something else——),—however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their vassals.
The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him something of what had been happening.
The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm—just as spiritus nitri does water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself to the devil. Christ’s implements of torture became holy relics; and, conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.
Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had come after the king’s shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to treat of something else.
To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or county militia regiment—and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia—is a distinguished and important body of men, whose raison d’être is to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning their backs upon him—showing him, in fact, nothing but backs, like a well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or “of peace” if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of being terrified at the city gates. It is called “being relieved.” When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort (“precious” they are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security’s sake, in public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to take away their muskets.
It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this—but it is not difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all small standing armies of lesser principalities—forces which are recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe’s Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill, such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them drilled, in order that they, the State’s children, may thus be taught mores, carriage, and all that has to be acquired in the State’s school? The truth is that, even in the very smallest principalities, the soldiers often possess all the acquirements and accomplishments of real soldiers; they can present arms, stand bolt upright at portals, and smoke at all events, if not fire—matters which a poodle learns with ease, but a country bumpkin with more difficulty.
To these rehearsals of warlike business I attribute it that many otherwise clever and sensible men have allowed themselves to believe that this sham soldiery of the little States, is in fact a real soldiery; they must otherwise have seen in a moment that with so small a force neither could a small territory be defended, nor a large one attacked; neither is there indeed any need for even this small force, since in Germany the question of relative strength is merged in that of equality of religion. Hunger, cold, nakedness, and privation are the benefits which Vuillaume considers the soldier-game to hold out to his scholars, as lessons in patient endurance and fortitude; now these are the very advantages which the State schools above referred to confer upon the young men of the country—and that much more thoroughly and efficaciously than Vuillaume does—which, of course, is the entire object of the institution. I am quite aware that there are not infrequent cases in which perhaps a third part of the population escapes being made into soldiery, and consequently gets none of the valuable practice in question; at the same time there can be no doubt that if we even get the length of having two-thirds of the population with rifles on their shoulders in the place of scythes, the remaining third (inasmuch as it has considerably less to mow, to thresh, and to subsist upon) obtains the before-mentioned benefits (of cold, hunger, nakedness, &c.), almost gratis, and without having to fire so much as a single shot. Let but barracks be multiplied in a sufficient ratio in a country, in a province, parish, town, village (as the case may be), and the remainder of the houses will of themselves settle down, into suburbs, and accessory and out-buildings to the barracks, nay, become absolute conventual establishments, in which the three monastic vows (the Prince alone being père provincial) are, whether taken or not, at all events most religiously kept.
We now hear the two vicars of the empire go into their homes. The friseur’s sole punishment to his wife is a narrative of the whole affair, and a sight of the hat; while the advocate rewards Lenette with the kiss which she had refused to other lips. If her story did not please him, the teller of it did, and on the whole the only thing she omitted was the flower-wreath, and the allusions made to it. She would not cloud the happiness of his evening, nor bring back upon him the pain and the reproaches of that other evening when she had pawned it. I, like many of my readers, had expected that Lenette would have received the news of the enthronisation far too coldly; she has deceived us all; she received it even too joyfully. But there were two good reasons for this; she had heard of it an hour before, and consequently the first feminine mourning over a joy had had time to give place to the joy itself. For women are like thermometers, which on a sudden application of heat sink at first a few degrees, as a preliminary to rising a good many. The second reason for her being thus indulgent and sympathetic was the humiliating consciousness she possessed of the Venner’s visit, and of the wreath in its hiding-place; for we are often severe when we are strong, and practise forbearance when we stand in need of it.
I now wish the entire royal family and household a good night, and a pleasant awaking in the eighth chapter.
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.
Siebenkæs, a king, and yet a poor’s-advocate and member of a wood-economising association, arose next morning a man who could lay forty good florins down upon his table at any hour of the day. The whole of that forenoon he enjoyed a pleasure which possesses, for the virtuous and right-thinking, an especial charm—that of paying debts: firstly, to the Saxon his house-rent, and then to the butchers, bakers, and other nurses of this needy machine, our body, their little duodecimo accounts. For he was like the aristocracy who borrow from the lower classes, not money, but only victuals, just as there are many judges who are bribeable with the latter, but not with the former.
That he does pay his debts is not a circumstance which should lower him in the opinion of anybody who remembers that he is a man of very poor “extraction”—scarcely of any “extraction” at all, in fact. A man of rank is expected (as a thing becoming his position) not to pay his debts, for thanks to the papal indulgences granted to his noble ancestors at the time of the Crusades, he need give his mind no trouble on the subject of liability, and least of all should liabilities of a pecuniary nature cause him a thought. To place a man of a high and delicate sense of honour, a courtier say, under an obligation (e.g. to lend him money) is to wound his feelings to a greater or less extent; and a wound of this sort to the feelings is a matter which his refined sensitive nature naturally leads him to endeavour to forgive; he will, therefore, do his utmost to drive the injury thus done him, with all its attendant circumstances, completely out of his mind. Should the person who inflicted this hurt upon his sense of honour remind him of it, he will then, with genuine delicacy of feeling, make as if he were scarcely aware that he had been wounded. Rough young squires, again, and officers on the march do really pay, and moreover, they coin (if the expression may be used) for themselves the money they require, as is the case in Algiers, where every one possesses the privilege of minting. In Malta there is current a leathern coin of the value of eightpence, on which is the legend “Non As, sed Fides.” With leather money of a somewhat different description, not circular in shape, but drawn out to some length, more like that of the ancient Spartans (and, indeed, this sort of money usually gets the appellation of dog-whips or riding-whips), the landed gentry and people of village nobility pay their coachmen, Jews, carpenters, and others to whom they owe money—going on paying them, in fact, until they are quite satisfied. Indeed I once stood at table and saw officers, men most tenacious of their honour, take their swords from the wall or from their sides, and therewith, when the boots asked for his money, pay him in the true currency of antiquity (among the brave Spartans, also, weapons were money), so that, in fact, the fellow’s jacket got a better brushing than most of the boots for cleaning which he wanted to be paid. And looking at the matter all round, ought it really to be accounted a grave offence in military personages, even of the highest rank, to pay their small debts? So that often, when some wretched tailor asks for metal, they take the iron ell-measure from him, and (while, moreover, applying to him in person the very measure which he applied to their furs) press—not perhaps into his hands, but on to a part of his body on which “contour” lines might be drawn—not mere coins, or bills on approved security, but a metal which Peru with all its wealth does not boast the possession of, the aforesaid iron to wit? In Sumatra the skulls of the enemy are their Louis d’ors and head-pieces, and even this species of currency—the hostile head of the tradesman who has furnished goods—is often taken by the nobler creditor, just by way of satisfying him “in full of all demands.” Neither in the Clausular Jurisprudence nor in the most recent Prussian code is it enacted that a creditor is to stipulate in his bill which species of currency he elects to be paid in by his noble debtor, the metallic currency or the castigatory.
On this Thursday morning Siebenkæs had a tough and ticklish argument, or piece of special pleading, to go through on the subject of the half-heart or (half-pig) of the cardinal protector, which his co-king, the hairdresser, pressed the acceptance of upon him, by way of making more sure of duly sharing all the prizes which appertained to the king’s shot himself. But his having gained the twenty-five florin prize did not add to the warmth of his arguments, and at last he agreed to the arrangement that the animal should be eaten, pure and clean, like a passover lamb, next Sunday in Siebenkæs’s room by the lodgers generally, and by the two rifle kings with their queens in company with Schulrath Stiefel. The flower goddess of the days of man took at this juncture a fingertipful or two of seeds of quickly blooming and quickly fading flowers (such as like the hellebore come into blossom in our December) and sowed them beside the path which Firmian’s steps most often trod. Ah, happy man, how soon will these forced blossoms fall from your days. Will not your philosophic Diana-and-bread-fruit tree (which takes the place, in your case, of an oak of lamentation) fare like the cut plants which people put in lime-water in their chambers on St. Andrew’s Day, and which, after a hurried outburst of yellowish leaves and feeble dingy flowers, fade and perish for good and all?
Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted; it is only during the first few days after the burden of poverty or sickness has been lifted from a man’s shoulders, that the upright posture, and the free breath, cause their fullest measure of delight. These days lasted for our Firmian until the Sunday. He built a whole cubic-foot of his Devil rampart (in his ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers’), he wrote reviews, he wrote law papers, he kept a careful eye on the maintenance of the household truce (liable to be disturbed by the question of the redemption of the pawned furniture). I shall treat of this matter firstly, before proceeding to give an account of the Platonic banquet of the Sunday. On Firmian’s coronation-day he invested twenty-one florins in a watch, with the view of avoiding frittering away his money by driblets; he thought it well to cast an anchor of hope into his watch-pocket. Then, when his wife talked of redeeming the salad-bowl, the herring-dish, and other pledges a matter involving not kisses only but half of his capital—he would say, “I’m not in favour of it, old Sabel would very soon have to carry them off again; however, if you’re determined, pray have them out, I shall not interfere.” If he had offered any opposition, back they would have had to come; but, inasmuch as he poured the greater portion of his cash into her money bag, and as she marked its daily ebb—and as she could go and redeem the furniture any day—why for that very reason she let it alone. Women are fond of putting off, men of pushing on; with the former, patience most speedily gains us our point; with the latter (ministers of the crown for instance) impatience. I here once more remind all German husbands, who have any pledge they do not wish to redeem, how to deal with their fair registers.
Every morning she said, “Ah! we really must send and get back our plates,” to which he as regularly antiphonated, “I don’t think so; I praise you rather for not doing it.” And in this manner he caused his own desire to assume the form of another person’s desert. Firmian understood some individual specimens of humanity, but not humanity as a class, in its broad sense; he was embarrassed with every woman at first, while her acquaintance was new, though not so afterwards when he came to know her better; he knew exactly how one ought to talk, walk, and stand, in “society,” but he never put this knowledge in practice; he took accurate note of all outward and inward awkwardness of other people, but yet retained all his own; and after treating his acquaintances for years with the airs of a superior, experienced man of the world accustomed to “society,” he would suddenly find, on some occasion of his being from home, that, unlike a true man of the world, he had no effect or influence whatever on people to whom he was a stranger; to make a long tale short, he was a man of letters.
Meanwhile, however, before the Sunday came, notwithstanding all the peace-sermons and peace-treaties in his heart, he found that he had plumped, before he knew where he was, right into the thick of a household battle of the frogs and mice once more, which occurred as follows:—It is matter of history, derived from his own statement, that, as Lenette kept on ceaselessly washing her hands and arms, as well as other things by the hundred (although, for the most part, with cold water, it being impossible to have warm water continually ready)—that, I say, he simply asked, in the gentlest tone in the world, the kindly and half-playful question, “Doesn’t that cold water give you cold?” She answered “No,” in a sostenuto voice. “Perhaps warm water would be more likely to do so, would it?” he continued. Her answer was, “Yes, it would,” delivered in a snapping staccato. Moralists and psychologists, who may be a good deal surprised at this half-angry answer to a question so innocent, are, contrary to my expectations, far behindhand in their knowledge of psychology in general, and the psychology of this tale in particular. Lenette knew by experience that the advocate, like Socrates, generally opened his battles in the most dulcet tones, as the Spartans commenced theirs to the sound of flutes, and, in fact, continued them in the same strain, that, like the said Spartans, he might retain complete command of himself. She therefore dreaded that, on this occasion also, his flute-text might usher in a declaration of war against the feminine form of government, of which the various provinces of work are divided one from another by washing-waters, as the judicial districts of modern Bavaria are by rivers.
“What key is a husband to play his tune in, I ask you all!” the advocate would often cry with curses, “since, whether he takes it in the major or in the minor, or plays piano or forte, it seems all the same in the end?”
On the present occasion, however, all he was aiming at, his gentleness of demeanour notwithstanding, was a preface to a proper system of educating or training the bodies of children. For after her answer he went on to say, “I am delighted to hear you say so. If we had children, I see you would be continually washing them, and with cold water, too, over their whole bodies, and this would invigorate them and make them strong and hardy, since, as you say, it produces warmth.” Her only answer to this was to hold her hands aloft, folded for victory, like the biblical prophet—for, in her eyes, a cold bathing of children was a Herodian blood-bath. Firmian then developed with much greater clearness his invigorating system of upbringing, while more and more strenuously strove his wife against it, with all her feathers ruffled, till by dint of able exposition on both sides of the respective masculine and feminine systems of rearing, they had nearly reached a point where they would have clashed together, like a couple of summer thunderclouds, had not he dispelled these by firing the following shot: “Good heavens! have we any children? Why should we make fools of ourselves in this way about the matter?”
“I was speaking of other people’s children,” was Lenette’s reply.
Consequently, as I said above, war did not break out, but, on the other hand, the morning of the Sabbath of peace brake in, and with it came the guests who were bent upon possessing themselves of (and eating) the warm and divided heart, or pig, of the Babylonish harlot, or Cardinal Protector. It seemed, in fact, as if some happy star of the wise men of the East must be standing in the heavens above this houseful of recipients of out-door relief, for there had, by good luck, been a gale of wind on the previous Friday which had blown down some half of the Government forest and strewn the path to Advent, for the poor, so grandly with branches (and the trees attached) that the entire staff of forest officials could not hinder the ingathering of such a vintage. For many a long year the Morbitzer’s house hadn’t boasted anything approaching to such a stock of timber, part of it purchased, part adroitly collected.
And if every Sunday is—in a poor man’s quarters—in itself and in the nature of things, not only a sun-day, but a moon-and-stars-day into the bargain a day when a poor fellow has his mouthful or two of food, his trifle or two of good clothes, his twelve hours for eating and twelve for lying down, besides the necessary neighbours to talk with—it may be conjectured in what a superlative sort this particular Sunday dawned upon the Morbitzer household, where everybody was as sure of eating his share of the pig in the afternoon as of hearing the sermon in the morning, and with as little to pay for the one as for the other, seeing that it was a settled matter that the lodger of greatest dignity in the establishment had determined that his coronation feast should be celebrated nowhere but there, at the table with mere working men.
Old Sabel was on the spot before the earliest church-bell had begun to toll. The rifle-king’s crown-treasury could afford to appoint her hereditary mistress of the kitchen, under Lenette, for a kreuzer or two and a plate or so of victuals; but the queen looked upon her as a superfluity and coadjutor, or auxiliary queen. A king on the chessboard gets two queens whenever a mere ordinary pawn gets moved on to the place of royalty, one of the royal squares (though he has not lost his first consort); and indeed it is just the same when it happens under the canopy of a throne. Lenette, however, would have preferred to have washed, cooked, and served the meats with her own unassisted hands, like a true Homeric or Carlovingian princess. The marksman-monarch himself fled the noisy, dusty throne-scaffold of the day, and in a loose old coat, happy and free, he rambled about the broad green levels of the quiet, blue, latter autumn, checked by no interfering dry stems or straw sheaves standing sentry on the plain, and bursting no thicker barrier-chains than the webs of the spiders. Never do husbands more happily and tranquilly take their walks abroad—out in the open country, or, indeed, up and down in other people’s rooms—than when, in their own, the stamping-mills, the sugar and fanning-mills are at work, whirling and roaring, and they promise themselves, at their home-coming, the clean, finished product and outcome of all these mill-wheels. Siebenkæs glanced with a poet’s idyllic eye from his quiet meadow into the distant noise-chamber, full of pans, choppers, and besoms, and found true and deep delight in a peaceful contemplation of the whirl of backwards and forwards assiduity going on there, and in picturing to himself and joining in, the pleasant tongue-visions of the hungry guests, till suddenly he grew red and hot. “You’re doing a fine thing!” he said, addressing himself; “I could do that, myself, too! But there’s the poor wife scrubbing and cooking herself to death at home, and nobody giving her even a thought of thanks.” And the least he could do was to vow, on the spot, that however he might find things moved about and “put in order” in the house on his return, he would accept and belaud it all without a word of demur.
And history vouches, to his honour, for the fact that when, on his reaching the house, he found his bookshelves dusted and his inkpot washed white on the outside, and all his belongings “put in order”—(in a different order to the previous one, be it observed),—he at once praised Lenette in the kindest manner, without a shade of irritation, and said she had performed her household processes and accomplished her cleaning and brushing in a manner quite after his heart, for that it was impossible to be too exquisitely neat and spick and span in the eyes of commonplace women, particularly such as composed the infernal triumvirate who were to be present that day (i. e. the bookbinder’s, the barber’s, and the shoemaker’s wives); and on that account he had left the intendance-general of the theatre of operations entirely to her—whereas, in the case of scholars, like Stiefel and himself, the room might be turned into a complete English scouring, carding, and brushing apparatus—for men of their sort never glanced down at trifles of that description from their sublime heights of mental contemplation.
But how pleasantly and cheerily did the president of the eating congress put all things in train by this his kindly temper, even before the assembling of the congress; though this appeared most fully after it had assembled. When the thirteen United States, by their thirteen deputies, dine together at a round table to celebrate some arrangement which they have jointly arrived at (and that they do so at least, establishes the fact that when thirteen dine at a table the thirteenth does not necessarily die), it is an easy matter for the thirteen free states in question, paying, as they do, the expenses out of thirteen treasuries, to treat their delegates as liberally as Firmian treated his guests. It is pleasant to look at cattle grazing in the meadows, but not so pleasant to see Nebuchadnezzar conducting himself like one of them; and similarly it is repulsive to see a man of cultivation pasturing with a too eager delight on the stomach’s meadow, the dinner-table (though it is not so in the case of the poor). Firmian’s guests were all of one mind, even the married couples; for it is a leading characteristic of the lower classes that they enter into a dozen treaties of peace and make as many declarations of war, in the course of the four-and-twenty hours, and particularly that they ennoble each of their meals into a feast of love and reconciliation. Firmian saw in the lower classes a kind of standing troupe of actors playing Shakespeare’s comedies, and thousands of times fancied that the dramatist himself was prompting them unseen. He had long coveted the pleasure of having some enjoyment or other of which he could give away some portion to the poor; he envied those rich Britons who pay the score of a beershop full of labourers, or, like Cæsar, give free commons to an entire town. The poor who have houses give to the poor who have not—one lazzarone gives to another—as shell-fish become the habitations of other crustaceans, and earthworms are the habitable universes of lesser worms.
In the evening arrived Peltzstiefel, who was too learned a man to eat swine’s flesh, or a measure of salt, among the untaught vulgar. And then Siebenkæs could once more entertain an idea unintelligible to any one but Stiefel. He could lay the sceptre and the tinted glass-ball of the imperial globe upon the table, and in his capacity of king of the feast and of the eagle, say that his long hair served him for a crown, like that of the old Frank kings, his own crown having been knocked down by his landlord’s rifle; he could assert that the rule by which only he by whose hands the eagle was brought down became king was clearly imitated from the code of the Fraticelli Berghadi, who could only elect to the papacy a person who had killed a child. That ’twas true he had it not in his power to reign over Kuhschnappel so long by fourteen days as the King of Prussia over the ecclesiastical see of Elten (the latter period being one of fifteen days)—that ’twas true he had a crown and revenues, but the latter were sadly reduced, cut down by one-half, in fact—and that he was far too much like the Great Mogul, who formerly had an income of two hundred and twenty-six millions a year, but now receives only the one hundred and thirteenth part of that sum; however, at his (Siebenkæs’s) coronation, though there had been no general liberation of the wicked prisoners, yet one good one had been released, namely, himself; also that, like Peter the Second of Arragon, he had been crowned with nothing worse than bread: finally that, under his ephemeral rule, nobody was beheaded, robbed, or beaten to death; and—which delighted him most of all—the feeling that he was like one of the ancient German princes, who governed, defended, and increased a free people, and was a member of that free people himself, &c. &c.
The throats in this royal chamber grew louder and drier as the evening advanced; the pipes (those chimneys of the mouth) made of the room a heaven of clouds, and of their heads heavens of joy. Outside, the autumn sun brooded, with warm, flaming wings, over the cold, naked earth, as if in haste to hatch the spring. The guests had drawn the quint, (I mean the five prizes of the five senses) out of the ninety numbers, or ninety years of the lottery of human life; the famished eyes were sparkling, and in Firmian’s soul the buds of gladness had burst their leaflet envelopes and swelled forth into flower. Deep happiness always leads love by the hand; and Firmian longed to-day, with an unutterable longing, to press his heart, all heavy with bliss, upon Lenette’s breast, and there forget all his wants and hers.
These circumstances, in their combination, inspired him with a strange idea. He determined, on this happy day, to go and redeem the pawned silken flower-wreath and plant it in some dark spot out of doors, then take her out there in the evening, or perhaps even in the night, and give her a pleasant little surprise at the sight of it. He slipped out and took his way to the pawnbroker’s; but—as all our resolves begin in us as tiny sparks, and end in broad lightning flashes—so, as he went, he improved his original idea (of redeeming the wreath from pawn) into an altogether different one, that of buying real flowers and planting them by way of goal of the nocturnal ramble. There was no difficulty in getting red and white roses from the greenhouse of a gardener of the Prince of Oettingen-Spielberg, who had lately come to the place. He walked round under the upright glass roofs, all behung with blossom, went to the gardener and got what he wanted—only no forget-me-nots, for these, of course, the man had left the meadows to supply. But forget-me-nots were indispensable, to make the loving surprise complete. He therefore took his real autumn flowers to the pawnbroker woman’s, in whose hands his silk plants had been deposited, that he might twine the dead, poor, cocoon forget-me-nots among the living roses. What was his astonishment to learn that the pledge had been redeemed and taken away by Mr. von Meyern, and that he had paid a sum of money so considerable that the woman thought she still owed the advocate a debt of thanks. It needed all the strength of a heart fortified by love to keep him from going at once to the Venner with a storm of reproaches for this move of warlike strategy—this pledge-robbery—for he could scarce endure the thought (a mistaken idea, ’tis true, only given rise to by Lenette’s silence on the subject of the garland) of his pure love’s pretty token in Rosa’s beringed and thievish fingers. The brokeress, too, though she was not to blame, would have been severely taken to task had it been any other day, one less full of love and happiness; as it was, however, Firmian cursed in a merely general manner, especially as the woman gave him silk forget-me-nots of somebody else’s, when he said he wanted some. When in the street again, he was at variance with himself as to the spot where he should plant his flowers; he wished he knew where to find some fresh-dug bed of fine old mould, of which the dark colour should set off to advantage the red and blue of the flowers. At length he saw a field which is broken into beds at all seasons—in summer and in winter, ay, in the bitterest cold—the churchyard, with its church, hanging like a vineyard on the slope of a hill beyond the town. He slipped in by a back entrance and saw the fresh-raised boundary-hillock which marked the close of an earthly life, rolled, as it were, up to the foot of the triumphal gate, through which a mother, with her newborn child in her arms, had passed away into the brighter world. Upon this earthen bier he laid his flowers down, like a funeral garland, and then went home.
The members of the gladsome company had scarcely missed him; they were floating, like fish benumbed in their element saturated with foreign matter, paralysed with the poison of pleasure; but Stiefel was still in his senses, and was talking with Lenette. The world has already learned from the former portion of this history—the people of the house, too, were well aware—that Firmian was fond of running away from his guests, in order to throw himself back into their society with a greater zest, and that he interrupted his pleasures in order that he might savour them—as Montaigne used to have himself awakened from his sleep that he might thoroughly appreciate what it was—and so Firmian merely said that he had been out.
All the waves, even the most turbulent of them, subsided at last, and there was nothing left in the ebb save those three pearl mussels, our three friends. Firmian gazed with tender eyes upon Lenette’s bright ones, for he loved her the more fondly because he had a pleasure in store for her. Stiefel glowed with a love so pure that, without any serious error of logic, he was able to define and classify it to himself as a mere sympathetic rejoicing in her happiness; particularly as his love for the wife placed wings, not fetters, upon his affection for her husband. Indeed the Schulrath’s anxiety was directed altogether to the reverse side of the question, his only doubt being whether he had it in him to express his love with adequate force and ardour. Therefore he pressed both their hands many times, and laid them between his own; he said beauty was a thing to which he very rarely paid any attention, but that he had been observant of it that day, because that of Mrs. Siebenkæs had appeared to such great advantage amid all her labours, particularly with all these ordinary women about her, and at them he had not so much as looked. He assured the advocate that he had considered his goodness and kindness to this admirable wife of his as a mark of increased personal friendship for himself; and he asseverated to her that his affection for her, of which he had given some little proof as they came together from Augspurg in the coach, would grow stronger the more she loved his friend, and through that friend, himself.
Into this cup of joy of hers Firmian of course cast no drop of poison relative to (what he supposed to be) the news of the Venner’s having made prize of the flowers. He was so happy that day; his little toy crown had so tenderly covered and soothed all the bleeding wounds on that head of his whence he had lifted his crown of thorns just a little way (as Alexander’s diadem soothed the bleeding head of Lysimachus), that his only wish was that the night might be as long as a Polar one, since it was just as calm and peaceful, as bright and serene. In moments like these the poison fangs of all our troubles are broken out, and a Paul, like him in Malta of old, has turned all the tongues of the soul’s serpents to stone.
When Stiefel rose to go, Firmian did not detain him, but insisted that he should allow them both to go with him, not to their own door only, but to his. They went out. The broad heaven, with the streets of the City of God all lit with the lamps which are suns, drew them on, out beyond the narrow crossways of the town, and into the great spectacle hall of night, where we breathe the blue of heaven, and drink the east breeze. We should conclude and sanctify all our chamber feasts by “going to church” in that cool, vast temple, that great cathedral whose dome is adorned with the sacred picture of the Most Holy, portrayed in a mosaic of stars. They roamed on refreshed and exalted by breezes of the coming spring hastening to blow before their appointed time, those breezes which wipe the snow away from the mountains. All nature gave promise of a mild winter—to lead the poor, who have no fuel, gently through the darkest quarter of the year—it was a season such as none curse except the rich, who can order sleighs but not snow.
The two men carried on a conversation befitting the sublimity of the night; Lenette said nothing. Firmian said, “How near together these miserable oyster banks, the villages, seem to be, and how small they are; when we go from one of these villages to another the journey seems to us about the same in length as a mite’s, if it crawled on a map from the name of the one to the name of the other, might appear to it. And to higher spirits our earth-ball may perhaps be a globe for their children, which their tutor turns and explains.”
“Yet,” said Stiefel, “there may very possibly be worlds even smaller than this earth of ours; and, after all, there must be something in ours since the Lord Christ died for it.” At this the warm blood rushed to Lenette’s heart. Firmian merely answered, “More Saviours than one have died for this world and mankind, and I am convinced that Christ will one day take many a good man by the hand, and say, ‘You have suffered under your Pontius Pilate too!’ And for that matter many a seeming Pilate is very likely a Messiah, if the truth were known.” Lenette’s secret dread was that her husband was really an absolute Atheist, or at all events a “philosopher.”
He led them by snaky windings and corkscrew paths to the churchyard; but suddenly his eyes grew moist, as one’s do when passing through a thick mist, when he thought of the mother’s grave with the flowers on it, and on Lenette who gave no sign of ever becoming one. He strove to expel the sadness from his heart by philosophic speeches. He said human beings and watches stop while they are being wound up for a new long day; and that he believed that those dark intervals of sleep and death, which break up and divide our existence into segments, prevent any one particular idea from getting to glare too brightly, and our never-cooling desires from searing us wholly—and oven our ideas from interflowing into confusion—just as the planetary systems are separated by gloomy wastes of space, and the solar systems by yet greater gulfs of darkness. That the human spirit could never take in and contain the endless stream of knowledge which flows throughout eternity, but that it sips it by portions at a time, with intervals between: the eternal day would blind our souls were it not broken into separate days by midsummer nights (which we call, now sleep, now death), framing its noons in a border of mornings and evenings.
Lenette was frightened, and would have liked to run away behind the wall and not go into the churchyard; however, she had to go in. Firmian, holding her closely to him, took a roundabout path to the place where the wreath was. He closed the little clattering metal gates which guarded the pious verses and the brief life-careers. They came to the better-class graves nearest the church, which lay round that fortress like a kind of moat. Here there were nothing but upright monuments standing over the quiet mummies below, while further on were mere trapdoors let down upon recumbent human beings. A bony head, which was sleeping in the open air, Firmian set a-rolling, and—heedless of Lenette’s oft-renewed entreaties to him not to make himself “unclean”—he took up in both his hands this last capsule case of a spirit of many dwelling places, and, looking into the empty window-openings of the ruined pleasure-house, said, “They ought to get up into the pulpit inside there at midnight, and put this scalped mask of our Personality down upon the desk in place of the Bible and the hourglass, and preach upon it as a text to the other heads sitting there still packed in their skins. They should have my head, if they liked to skin it after my decease, and hook it up in the church like a herring’s, upon a string, by way of angel at the font—so that the silly souls might for once in their lives look upward and then downward—for we hang and hover between heaven and the grave. The hazel-nut worm is still in our heads, Herr Schulrath, but it has gone through its transformation and flown out from this one, for there are two holes in it and a kernel of dust.”[[51]]
Lenette was terrified at this godless jesting in such close proximity to ghosts; yet it was but a disguised form of mental exaltation. All at once she whispered, “There’s something looking down at us over the top of the charnel house. See, see, it’s raising itself higher up.” It was only the evening breeze lifting a cloud higher; but this cloud had the semblance of a bier resting on the roof, and a hand was stretched forth from it, while a star, shining close to the cloud’s edge, seemed like a white flower laid on the heart of the form which lay upon the bier of cloud.
“It is only a cloud,” said Firmian; “come nearer to the house, and then we shall lose sight of it.” This furnished him with the best possible pretext for leading her up to the blooming Eden in miniature upon the grave. When they had walked some twenty paces, the bier was hidden by the house. “Dear me,” said the Rath, “what may that be in flower there?” “Upon my life,” cried Firmian, “white and red roses, and forget-me-nots, wife.” She looked tremblingly, doubtingly, inquiringly at this resting-place of a heart, decked with a garland, at this altar with the sacrifice lying beneath it. “Very well then, Firmian,” she cried, “I’m sure I can’t help it, it is no fault of mine; but oh! you shouldn’t have done such a thing! oh dear! oh dear! will you never cease tormenting me!” She began to weep, and hid her streaming eyes on Stiefel’s arm.
For she, who was so delicately clever in nothing as in touchiness and taking umbrage, supposed this garland was the silken one from her wardrobe, and that her husband knew that Rosa had presented it to her, and had placed the flowers upon this grave of a woman, dead in childbed, in mockery either of her childlessness or of herself. These mutual misunderstandings were to the full as confounding to him as to her; he had to combat her errors, and at the same time ask himself what his own consisted of. It was only now that she told him that Rosa had some time since returned the pawned wreath to her. Upon the green thistle-plant of mistrust of her love, a flower or two now came out; nothing is more painful than when a person whom we love hides something from us for the first time, were it but the merest trifle. It was a great distress and disappointment to Firmian that the pleasant surprise he had prepared should have taken such a bitter turn. There was too much of the artificial about his garland to commence with, but the foul fiend, Chance, had malevolently crisped and twirled it up, with added weeds, into a more unreal and unnatural affair than ever. Let us take care then not to hire Chance into the heart’s service.
The Schulrath, at his wits’ end, gave vent to his embarrassment in a warm curse or two upon the Venner’s head; he tried to establish a peace congress between the husband and wife (who were sunk in silent musing), and strongly urged Lenette to give her hand to her husband and be reconciled to him. But nothing would induce her. Yet, after long hesitation, she agreed to do it, but only on condition that he would first wash his hands. Hers shrunk away in convulsive loathing from touching those which had been in contact with a skull.
The Schulrath took away the battle-flag from them, and delivered a peace-sermon which came warm from his heart. He reminded them what the place was in which they stood, surrounded by human beings all gone to their last account; he bade them think for a moment how near they were to the angels who guard the graves of the just, the very mother (he pointed out) who was mouldering at their feet, with her baby in her arms (and whose eldest son he himself was bringing along in his Latin studies—he was then in Scheller’s principia), might be said to be admonishing them not to fall out about a flower or two over her quiet grave, but rather to take them away as olive-branches of peace. Lenette’s heart drank his theologic holy water with far greater zest than Firmian’s pure, philosophic Alp water, and the latter’s lofty thoughts of Death shot athwart her soul without the slightest penetration. However, the sacrifice of reconciliation was accomplished and mutual letters of indulgence exchanged. At the same time, a peace like this, brought about by a third party, is always something in the nature of a mere suspension of hostilities. Strangely enough they both awoke in the morning with tears in their eyes, but could not tell whether happy dreams or sad ones had left these drops behind.
FIRST FLOWER PIECE.
THE DEAD CHRIST PROCLAIMS THAT THERE IS NO GOD.
INTRODUCTION.
My aim in writing this fiction must be my excuse for its audacity.
Men, as a class, deny God’s existence with about the same small amount of true consideration, conviction, and feeling as that with which most individual men admit it. Even in our regularly established systems of belief we form collections of mere words, game-counters, medallions—just as coin-collectors accumulate cabinetsful of coins—and not till long after our collection is made do we convert the words into sentiments, the coins into enjoyments. We may believe in the immortality of the soul for twenty years long, yet it may be the twenty-first before, in some one supreme moment, we suddenly perceive, to our astonishment, what this belief involves, and how wonderful is the warmth of that naphtha spring.
In a similar manner to this, I myself was suddenly horror-struck at the perception of the poison-power of that vapour which strikes with such suffocating fumes to the heart of him who enters the school of Atheistic doctrine. It would cause me less pain to deny immortality than to deny God’s existence. In the former case, what I lose is but a world hidden by clouds; but in the latter, I lose this present world, that is to say, its sun. The whole spiritual universe is shattered and shivered, by the hand of Atheism, into innumerable glittering quicksilver globules of individual personalities, running hither and thither at random, coalescing, and parting asunder without unity, coherence, or consistency. In all this wide universe there is none so utterly solitary and alone as a denier of God. With orphaned heart—a heart which has lost the Great Father—he mourns beside the immeasurable corpse of Nature, a corpse no longer animated or held together by the Great Spirit of the Universe—a corpse which grows in its grave; and by this corpse he mourns until he himself crumbles and falls away from it into nothingness. The wide earth lies before such an one like the great Egyptian sphinx of stone, half-buried in the desert sand; the immeasurable universe has become for him but the cold iron-mask upon an eternity which is without form and void.
I would also fain awaken, with this piece of fiction, some alarm in the hearts of certain masters and teachers (reading, as well as read); for, in truth, these men (now that they have come to do their appointed day’s work, like so many convicts, in the canal-diggings and in the mine-shaft excavations, of the “critical” schools of philosophy) discuss God’s existence as cold-bloodedly and chill-heartedly as though it were a question of the existence of the kraken or the unicorn.
For others, who have not progressed quite so far as this I would further remark, that the belief in immortality may without contradiction, co-exist with the belief in Atheism, for the self-same necessity which, in this life, placed my little shining dew-drop of a personality in a flower-cup and beneath a sun, can certainly do the same in a second life—ay, and could embody me with still greater ease for a second time than for the first.
When, in our childhood, we are told that, at midnight, when our sleep reaches near the soul and darkens our very dreams, the dead arise from theirs, and in the churches ape the religious services of the living, we shudder at death, because of the dead, and in the loneliness of night we turn our eyes in terror from the tall windows of the silent church, and dread to look at their pale shimmer to see whether it be truly the reflection of the moon’s beams—or something else!
Childhood and its terrors (even more than its pleasures) assume, in our dreams, wings and brightness, shining glowworm-like in the dark night of the soul. Extinguish not these little flickering sparks! Leave us the dim and painful dreams even; they serve to make life’s high-lights all the more brilliant. And what will ye give us in exchange for the dreams which raise and bear us up from beneath the roar of the falling cataract back to the peaceful mountain-heights of childhood, where the river of life was flowing as yet in peace, reflecting heaven upon its little surface, on towards the precipices of the future course.
Once on a summer evening I was lying upon a quiet hillside in the sun. I fell asleep, and dreamed that I awoke in a churchyard. The rattle of the wheels of the clock running down as it was striking eleven, had awakened me. I looked for the sun in the dark and void night sky, for I supposed that some eclipse was hiding it with the moon. And all the graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house kept opening and shutting, moved by invisible hands. Athwart the walls shadows went flitting; but no bodies cast those shadows and there were others, too, moving about out in the open air. Within the open coffins there were none now asleep, except the children. Nothing was in the sky but sultry fog, heavy and grey, ranging there in great clammy folds; and some gigantic shadow closed and closed this fog as in a net, and drew it ever nearer, closer, and hotter. Up overhead I heard the thunder of distant avalanches, and beneath my feet the first footfalls of a boundless earthquake. The church was heaved and shaken to and fro by two terrific discords striving in it, beating in stormy effort to attain harmonious resolution. Now and then a greyish glimmer passed with rapid gleam flittering athwart the windows; but, whenever this glimmer came, the lead and iron of the frames always melted and ran rolling down. The fog’s net, and the quaking of the earth, drove me into the temple, past gleaming, glittering basilisks, brooding in poison-nests beside the door. I passed among shadows, strange and unknown to me; but they all bore the impress of the centuries. These shadows stood all grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered and throbbed—their breasts but not their hearts. There was but one of the dead still lying on his pillow, and he was one who had but just been buried in the church; he lay at peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream upon his smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of the living), his sleep broke, he awoke, and smiled no more; with painful effort he raised his heavy eyelids—and there was no eye beneath—and in his beating breast there was no heart, but a deep wound instead. He raised his hands, folded as it for prayer; but then his arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the folded hands came off and fell away. Upon the dome above there was inscribed the dial of eternity—but figures there were none, and the dial itself was its own gnomon; a great black finger was pointing at it, and the dead strove hard to read the time upon it.
And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down towards our group, and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead cried out, “Christ! Is there no God?”
He answered, “There is none.”
At this the dead quivered and trembled; but now it was not their breasts alone that throbbed; the quivering ran all through the shadows, so that one by one the shudder shook them into nothingness. And Christ spake on, saying, “I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, ‘Father, where art Thou?’ But answer came there none, save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none; and towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again and yet again. Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din, for He is not!”
The pale and colourless shades flickered away to nothingness, as frosty fog dissolves before warm breath, and all grew void. Ah! then the dead children, who had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into the temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight to rend one’s heart), and cried, “Jesus, have we no Father?” He made answer, with streaming tears, “We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no Father.”
Then the discords clashed and clanged more harshly yet; the shivering walls of the temple parted asunder, and the temple and the children sank—the earth and sun sank with them—and the boundless fabric of the universe sank down before us, while high on the summit of immeasurable nature Jesus stood and gazed upon the sinking universe, besprent with thousand suns, and like a mine dug in the face of black eternal night; the suns being miners’ lamps, and the milky way the veins of silvery ore.
And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, the wild torch dance of starry will-o’-the-wisps, and all the coral banks of throbbing hearts—and saw how world by world shook forth its glimmering souls on to the Ocean of Death—then He, sublime, loftiest of finite beings, raised his eyes towards the nothingness and boundless void, saying, “Oh dead, dumb, nothingness! necessity endless and chill! Oh! mad unreasoning Chance—when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and me too? Chance, knowest thou—thou knowest not—when thou dost march, hurricane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun after sun upon thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of constellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass them by? How every soul in this great corpse-trench of an universe is utterly alone? I am alone—none by me—O Father, Father! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I may rest upon it? Alas! if every soul be its own father and creator, why shall it not be its own destroying angel too? Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! That petty life of thine is but the sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world—dust which is dead men’s ashes. Look ye down into the chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of Death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour. Dost thou see and know thy earth?”
Here Christ looked downward, and his eyes grew full of tears, and he spake on, and said, “Alas! I, too, was once of that poor earth; then I was happy, then I still possessed my infinite Father, and I could look up from the hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could cry even in the bitterness of death, ‘My Father, take thy Son from out this bleeding earthly shell, and lift Him to thy heart.’ Alas! too happy dwellers upon earth, ye still believe in Him. Your sun, it may be, is setting at this hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears ye sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your hands in rapturous joy, ye cry each one aloud up to the open heavens, ‘Oh Father, infinite, eternal, hear! Thou knowest me in all my littleness, even as Thou knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou wilt receive me after death and soothe and heal them all.’ Alas! unhappy souls! For after death these wounds will not be healed. But when the sad and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame upon the earth to sleep towards a fairer brighter morn all truth, goodness and joy,—behold! he awakes amid a howling chaos, in a night endless and everlasting; and no morning dawns, there is no healing hand, no everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who standest near, if still thou breathest the breath of life, worship and pray to Him, or else thou losest Him for evermore.”
And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and rise, and then again they tightened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and crashed the worlds together, and crushed down the boundless temple to a little churchyard chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe to countless atoms,—when my sleep broke up, and I awoke.
And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship God—my gladness, and my weeping, and my faith—these were my prayer! And as I rose the sun was gleaming low in the west, behind the ripe purple ears of corn, and casting in peace the reflection of his evening blushes over the sky to where the little moon was rising clear and cloudless in the east. And between the heaven and the earth, a gladsome, shortlived world was spreading tiny wings, and, like myself, living in the eternal Father’s sight. And from all nature round, on every hand, rose music-tones of peace and joy, a rich, soft, gentle harmony, like the sweet chime of bells at evening pealing far away.