On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and abridge my “45 Dog Post Days” into the space of about the same number of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary.
I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried “let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us.” Indeed, had these gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and had they then seen, or more properly, nearly lost sight of, that gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the softer and the more impressionable the purer they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves, and the snoring father——
Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone on with in a calmer mood.
I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment—my opinions on the French War, and the high prices of everything—that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in length—that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the “revising barristers” of and “lodgers of appeals” against the newspaper writers; that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail themselves of these resurrected ones in the next “affaire;” whilst the soldiers’ children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock’s orthographical rule, only to write what you hear.
When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann’s cradle. My ‘Hesperus’ is too big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars—then introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the Laws of Nature, seeing that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply—from this point I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose, attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann’s soul (his body) the following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists among the princes of Germany. “I do not mean as regards the animal world,” I continued slowly and tediously. “Kartesius, as we know, is of opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently, man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this—do not the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality of a realm consists in Extension, as Kartesius holds that of matter to do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its essentiality consists in Solidity.”
He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad awake as you please, “There are only two of them that can pay their way—the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of——”
At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and set to work printing her brothers’ names at full length upon their shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.
Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in pumping out what follows.