Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall here be made the reader’s property.
I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts—into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in business—that true corpus callosum of the German empire—buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of body), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his ‘Enumeration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,’ has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of “wizard” and “witchmaster,”—whose spiritus rector and grand master seems to have been the devil himself—having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official positions—can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment—(if he did he would no longer be “born,” he would be “made” by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases—and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never copious enough or condensed enough. At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny, jerking water-wagtails.
The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there’s nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.
The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more—an author has little need to trouble himself about their votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don’t read him. At all events, they don’t deserve the dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my ‘Hesperus,’ or the ‘Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,’ to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:—
Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o’clock. Soon after this, by scraping and pinching, he became a “pretty rich house” (though he kept a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say, the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a watchful corps of observation, insisted upon making him their captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only makes a beginning at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre’s through magic vapour.
Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of it—like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but politics—he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it—the tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater attractive power than either)—he knows no higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book and the ledger.
“May I be d—d,” thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, “if I can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn’t possibly know what I meant” it occurred to me; and on account of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan.
Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her father’s, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)—from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the latter) to stay to supper.
Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany about my ears—aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose—I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn’t take much to put him to sleep.