The Genuine Criminal Prosecutor.--My Magistracy.--A Birthday and a Smuggling of Grain.
When, on the following Thursday, I set out to visit my Gustavus and instruct him a little, behold Herr von Oefel, for a reason which it will take a whole section to unfold preliminarily and profoundly, has despatched him with a body of Hussars to the borders, where they were to form a frumentary cordon, which should let no grain go out and no pepper come in. Since most popular movements take their rise in peristaltic ones [those of the stomach], many people of fine sense would have it they nosed out that the sovereign did the thing in order that his subjects might have the means of living.
But I was brought at last into the greatest scrape with it all, and one shall now hear how the matter was, but it must be from the very beginning.
Namely, thus: the great Manor of Maussenbach has, as it is well known, the supreme jurisdiction, although I and Mr. Commercial Agent von Röper are vexed at it, on opposite grounds. I am vexed because I see the life, at least the honor, of some hundreds of people in the hands, not of a whole Roman people, but of a single official, etc.; the hereditary, feudal and juridical lord is vexed, because the criminal court brings in nothing, since it costs more to have the executioners sword sharpened than all comes to which is mowed down by it into the treasury. "Adultery is the only thing left for the criminal magistracy!" says the hereditary lord. Quite the opposite said his justice, Kolb; high criminal trials were his high opera, penal acts were his Klopstock's odes, and a constable his Orestes and Sancho Panza. He would have divided the people into two classes, the hanging and the hanged, and he would have remained criminal prosecutor. An unshaven malefactor in prison was to him a Chinese goldfish in a glass bowl, both were shown to guests. Free hunt after scoundrels only in two or three quarters of the globe would have been his business and pleasure. He hated me to death, because I had defended a man against him and saved him from death and got him into the penitentiary. He possessed the necrology of all who had been executed and a matriculation or genealogical register of all robbers (except robbers of honor) who stood ripe for reaping, and genuine knaves were for him what well-disposed men were for the biographic Plutarch. In brief, he was a genuine criminal prosecutor, just as the old German or modern English laws would have him; for according to both every man must be judged and sentenced only by his peers; but Kolb every knave and murderer could claim to be as great a one as himself, and consequently the culprit could say that he enjoyed the legal benefit of being tried by one of his peers. I know not many contemporary criminal counsellors and members of faculties to whom this could be applied.
This annoyed Röper exceedingly, for his criminal counsellor brought upon him every month a case that involved enormous expenses; and high criminal judges are not so well served by the securing of criminals as by keeping up the succession. In short, when the magistrate thought to undertake a new levy of gallows recruits in the woods of Maussenbach, for which perhaps Robisch was to blame, Herr von Röper would nullify these thief-pressgangs by offering as many insults to his criminal counsellor as were necessary to bring it about that the magistrate could do no less than resign.
He did, to be sure, one thing more, the rascal, he drew a picture of my littleness. As he could not forget my defensive argument, he acted the fiscal attorney, and told Röper I was good for nothing. I was a man who hated him and sundry other noblemen, and who had the finest court-style; Paul took every case of subjects against their liege-lord, and had once even plied his quill against his honor the Commercial Agent. Thou wretch of a Kolb! Why should not One-legs do that? My most important cases are to this very day no other. And why should not, in fact, a proposition be realized which I will forthwith make? This, namely, that, after the pattern of the poor man's attorney, there should be instituted people's attorneys, who should contend merely against patrimonial tribunals, as the Knights of Malta do against infidel ones.
I have it from Röper's own mouth; for, in short, he installed me, to be sure, as Maussenbach--magistrate, let the advocating and reading world be as much astonished as it will. The Kolbian attacks were my very spiral stairway to this judicial bench. My judicial principal must needs, in his eternal battles with all instances and noble folk, have a juristic Taureador vigorous pen-harpooner; but Kolb said I was one. Secondly, Herr von Röper presented me the bench of justice, because I neither rode (on account of my short leg) nor drove (on account of my sea-sick stomach), and consequently would go on foot to the administration of justice without the bevy of horses which his stable otherwise must furnish as perquisites. For reviewers and their editors the hint will do no harm, that they would be pleased to consider and from this time take paper and review a man who is not, like themselves, nothing; but one who sits in judgment as well as they, but over a more real life than the literary, and who can even hang such reviewers, if within his jurisdiction they steal anything but reputation.
Now comes the main thing. I was for the first time, as judge, in Maussenbach and entered upon the duties of my office. All went very well; I and my subjects were presented to each other, and I had on this day over five hundred hands in mine. Of course I had still to smooth down many an ugly face, which they made at me, because they had been in the habit of making it at my little-loved principal; for people and nobles, not merely in Rome, but also in our villages now-a-days, are always in each other's hair and fighting like cats and dogs about financial matters. Beside my magistracy, something else celebrated a birthday to-day--the patron himself, Röper; we feasted, therefore, right well in honor of two things; first, because the parliament which he had dissolved was in me to-day convoked again; and secondly, because the summoner had, many years before, been born. I can say, I had a good time of it, despite my unlikeness to the new born one--of thee I am not at all speaking, Louisa and judicial Patroness!--what lame heart would not beat in sympathetic harmony with thine, when it saw thy eye glisten at the pleasure of thy husband and with wishes for his welfare? But it is of thy wedded lord himself I speak: let him be, now, what he will, it is impossible for me, in regard to a man with whom I sit under the same keeping-room ceiling, to think the evil which I have hitherto heard or even believed of him, and it is really not the same thing, whether a highway or only a table is between us. If thou hatest a man from hearsay; then go into his house and see whether, when thou hast discovered in his conversation so many friendly traits, in his behavior toward the child or the wife whom he loves so many signs of affection, whether, then, thou goest out again with the hatred which thou broughtest in. If the present author was ever in his life prepossessed against anything, it was against the great; but since, in his musical lessons at Scheerau, he has the opportunity of standing under the same ceiling with many a great one, since he has himself skipped round among these giants; he sees that a minister who oppresses his people may love his children, and that the misanthrope at the session-table may be a philanthropist at the sewing-table of his wife. Thus the Alpine peaks have in the distance a bold and steep aspect, but near to, room enough and good plants.
I confess, therefore, when according to ancestral usage (on birthdays at court I never tasted the like) a tart or turnover was brought on, on which the Vivat and the name Röper could be read and eaten set in types of almonds--when, furthermore, the proprietor of the name said indeed: "this now is one of thy stupid tricks," but immediately had his eye fill with moisture and added: "cut out a piece for our people also outside," I confess, I say, I could at that moment have wished my memory rid of many a saying I had heard of him which did not well comport with the lapidary almond style, and I would especially have given something, the crabs most readily, if he had not been so troubled about the bits of gravel in their heads, and scolded so at his Louisa, who in her joy had scattered in sundry contributions to his crab dactyliotheca or collection of pebbles. I will just be candid, the deuce might have taken me, if I could have borne to remain hard as a crab-eye, when thou, my music-pupil, beloved Beata, who from the court-air[[59]] as other flowers do from the mephitic, hadst imbibed nothing but tenderer charms and a higher enamel--when thou, fair pupil, with a feminine sense of paternal respectability, didst go up to thy father and with thy lips on his hand, offer him the most sincere wishes, and when only on the neck of thy mother, who showered upon you both looks of love, thou didst let thy heart overflow into a more congenial one....
I come now to the promised main thing--namely, my Gustavus. I wish he had stayed away. He rode in advance of two Hussars, who were escorting a grain-wagon. The wagon was going to discharge its load beyond the limits--(the principality of Scheerau, like the human understanding, everywhere runs against limits)--the two Hussars were ready to be bribed, so far all was agreeable; but Gustavus was not; the conductor, the farmer, had given out that the smuggled goods were Röper's property--and from Röper the whole of Gustavus recoiled from his very fathers loins. Secondly, he was living now in bridal relations with virtue, and in the honeymoon, when one regards good works and moral hors d'œuvre [works of supererogation] as one and the same thing, and when style and virtue alike have too much fire. In short, farmer and wagon must go back; and the Cadet had burst into the birthday chamber to make the announcement with over-boiling indignation against Röperish treacheries. But was he in a fit frame to do this when he saw me again after many weeks and my fair scholar for the first time, and when he found himself among the faces glowing with friendship, from which he would at once banish blood and joy? The most he could do was to draw me aside and disclose to me all; but the overhearing neighborhood and the impetuous corpus delicti discovered the same to the Commercial Agent. Without ceremony he broke out into a furious tirade against the Cadet, who, as he said, had nothing to do with the matter, and continued rising to a climax in his fury, till a remedy occurred to him for the whole disaster. I had to go out with him before the street door and there he told me I could, as his magistrate, easily see that one must needs give out the grain as the property of the farmers, because the Prince would have no mercy on an official. This last assertion I, as his new magistrate, could well understand, that the covetous, arsenical king, who could tolerate office-trading, judicial misdemeanors, and the like, would nevertheless come down like a poisonous wind upon all disobedience to himself; but this I could not see through, that a second treason must needs be the abattis and advocate of the first. In the midst of our fight came running up at length the object of it, the farmer himself, who broke in with distorted visage and with the stammering entreaty that "His Grace would not ungraciously remark the fact that he in his bewilderment had given out his grain as His Grace's own." Now the knot was untied; my principal had until now merely confounded his own smuggled goods which had been successfully brought over the frontier with arrested goods of another party. To the farmer he forthwith, as a sound moralist, represented the wickedness of deceiving at once himself, the country, and the Prince, "and he wished he would break open now the writing of the Government, he would deliver him up on the spot." He hastened in to my Gustavus and hurled at him, with the heat of misunderstood innocence, as many coarsenesses as one might expect from an offended demi-millionaire, since gold possessors, like gold strings, sound the harshest. I pitied my dear Gustavus with his plethora of virtue; he pitied the ill-luck of the poor farmer, and Beata pitied our confusion all round. With boiling emotions Gustavus fled out of a dumb apartment, where he had broken off from the tenderest heart that ever trembled under a fair form, that of Beata, the flowers of childish joy, and dashed them to the ground.
In fact, now at length the old Harry was loose--namely, the howling of Röper's rage against the house of Falkenberg and its abominable extravagance, and against the Cadet. Beata was silent; but not I. I should have been a scoundrel (a greater one, I mean) if I had allowed extravagance, in the sense in which the adversary meant it, to be imputed to the Captain. I should, moreover, have been stupid (or stupider) if I had not in my first official act endeavored to accustom him to opposition, instead of waiting till the tenth or twentieth.... But the oil which I poured round for the purpose of smoothing his waves, dropped into fire instead of water. Little did it help either of us, that my pupil played upon us with the richest passages out of Benda's Romeo, the old hilarity was not to be brought back again; we twitched and twisted our faces to no purpose. Röper looked like an Indian cock and I like a European. I had intended, toward evening, after moon-rise, to be somewhat sentimental in the presence of Beata, seeing, besides, that the Count tore her away from me. I am certain I should have had sensibility and sentiment adequate to the occasion. I should, under the shade of a tree, have taken out my heart and said, prenez. Nay, I seemed even to-day to draw Beata much nearer to me than usual, a thing in which one prospers with all maidens with whose parents one has business associations. But all that was now gone to the old Harry. I was compelled to make my exit cold and hard as a page of the exchequer, and felt miserably. If the new magistrate was provoked, who had thus been ushered into his new office in a cloud of vexation, his principal was still more so, who had been escorted by a jar and jangle into his new year. So I limped off and said to myself all the way, "thus, then, and with such face and aspect art thou hieing home, happy Paul, from thy Maussenbach judgeship, of which thou hast boasted so much in thy former sections. Thou need'st not rise on my account, O moon; I need not to-night thy powdered face. That single, confounded grain-wagon! and the Prince! and the skin-flint, too! and even youthful virtue! Would that ye all.... But had I only been as sensible and felt as much in the very forenoon, and had I only, before dinner, shown forth something of my heart, an auricle, a fibre.
"Heigh! Mr. Magistrate," cried my Wutz, coming to meet me; "here again! Hast had fine cases of adultery, harlotry, riots, defamations?"
"Merely a few defamations," I replied.