“I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner with my two latest opuscula, or little works; the elder of the two is, curiously enough, called ‘Dog Post Days,’ and the later ‘Flower-pieces.’ Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it’s my fault alone, and nobody else’s, if you find you don’t quite know what the first of the two may be about—whether you are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects—or a dictionary of some particular dialect—or an ancient codex—or a Lexicon Homericum—or a collection of inaugural disputations—or a ready reckoner—or an epic poem—or a volume of funeral sermons. It really is nothing but an interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book’s favour that there are parts of it to be found—I hope not very many—in which there are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which so often seem as if they really must have been written by the old artless knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)—that my attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears of the great—but only those of the chaste—are not considered the most objectionable.”
I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, “it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper books deposited in public libraries, where the librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict of the censorship.” But Jacobus would speak out his thought, “Pauline, don’t let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn’t paid her fine yet.”
It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes’ time, than a man of business in as many hours.
Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following letters from her letterbox: “STORY”—i. e. she wanted to be told the “Dog Post Days” that evening.
So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: “The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my ‘Post Days’ may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons’ names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one, ‘Devil make a better of it all!’ Only he’s just the very last person to do it. For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments of universal world history are only being tuned in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much better than the opera itself)—in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the brave man—him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do something great and good—those who are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones—in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun, he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures have fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are incapable of business can work for the press.”
“There’s work, and there’s work,” the merchant, wide awake, struck in; “it all depends—Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn’t much better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging—not meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of books—arithmetic books, and so on.”
The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me, because my business was only the making of books, though in old days I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many people take of the convenances of society; but I think anyone on earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the fellow’s impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately and without abridgment, my “extra leaflets” from my ‘Hesperus.’
This, of course, was bound to put him to death—sleep, I mean.
And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the author—then commenced our feast of unleavened bread—then I could sit down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and besieged by sermons—which cannot refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the superintendent’s and his wife’s, nor with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of some mesh in the nun’s veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern land—to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes—to lift her beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery—to set it free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth than those of the country round.
I had just finished by one o’clock. I had taken only three hours to the three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the “extra leaves.” “If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that’s not purely historical,” I said, and sacrificed my most precious digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is not quite the proper soil.