I know of no greater mental tumult—hardly of any sweeter—which can arise in a young man’s being, than that which he experiences when he is walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed it is a point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal the great general, strode up and down their rooms at a greater pace when they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they would go to Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a ‘Selection from the Devil’s Papers,’ was forced to run out of the house, and three times round the market-place, just to fix his fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper grooves again by the process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by the glow within him—looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house for his manuscript—and running up to his Lenette, who was tranquilly working away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take the needle out of her mouth—last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss she quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting down at it the best way she could without moving her head).
“Rejoice with me!” he cried, “come and dance about with me! to-morrow I’m going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf’s head to-night, though it be a breach of our ten commandments.” For he and she, on the Wednesday before, had formed themselves into a committee on food regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy, which had then been passed and subscribed to, one was that, Brahminlike, they were to do without meat at supper.
But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another calf’s head with a single sheet of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’ and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation from that evening’s fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like Racine’s wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was, although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn’t capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me over with his hour-glass in the middle of,—or who wouldn’t be unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I deserved perhaps.
The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs’s blood-globules into such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper), he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across—such as the servant girl’s heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with which her utterance was afflicted;—but that he at once laid hold on a precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness, and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce, untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy would either not have died at all, or would have died of a better and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful heavenward gaze.
His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks, between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a zealous and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in the case of a girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture on the rack. The state-physician of the borough had condemned her to the “trial by the lungs,” a neither more nor less suitable punishment than the “trial by water” (which used to be inflicted on witches).
Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon. Only there sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was stretching herself and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly accomplishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gentleman in flesh-coloured silk.
“I really feel quite ashamed to stretch,” she said; “there’s a gentleman always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and notes one down just as if he were the meat appraiser.”
The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the solemn promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them often, and at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think I shall call him Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the ear—seeing that the whole town gave him that name on account of the gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of a portable wood-economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he came in at the door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and stuck them into the advocate’s button-bole, by appointing him on the spot his collaborateur on the ‘Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly Messenger, and School Programme Review’—a work which ought to be better known, so that the works recommended by it might be so too. This newspaper engagement of Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so towards a supper now and then. The Schulrath, who was editor of this paper, had a high sense of the power and responsibility of his post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to the dignity of an author—the only being who in his eyes was superior even to a reviewer—for Lenette had told him on the way to church that her husband was going to have a great thick book printed. The Schulrath considered the ‘Salzburg Literary Gazette’ of the period the apocryphal, and the ‘Jena Literary Gazette’ the canonical scriptures: the single voice of one reviewer was, for his ears, multiplied by the echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to surround the heads of sinners with delusive false heads, that the executioner might miss his stroke at them.
The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single individual’s opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if arrived at by a whole council; but then if his name were put at the end, for instance, “X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity,” instead of “New Universal German Library,” it would weaken the effect of the divinity student’s learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. The Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his satirical turn; for he himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed himself into a wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently the case with good-tempered men when they write, particularly on humaniora and such like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to Gibbon) are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just as the Idyllic painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.
And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such, when he took from Leibgeber’s collection of coins a gnat or wasp dollar, and gave it to him, not as a douceur for his appointment to the critical wasp’s nest, but that he might turn it into small change. The Schulrath who, being himself the zealous “Silberdiener” (master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own, would have been delighted if money had existed solely for the sake of cabinets—(meaning, however, numismatic, not political, cabinets)—sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared to the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the coin-fancier’s price) that he considered this a piece of true friendship. “No,” answered Siebenkæs, “the only piece of true friendship about the matter is Leibgeber giving me the dollar.” “But I’ll give you certainly three dollars for it, if you like to ask it,” said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel’s delight, and at his kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as an admonition not to give way, here struck in with an amount of determination which astonishes me, “But my husband’s not going to do anything of the kind, I assure you; a dollar’s a dollar.” “But,” said Siebenkæs, “I ought rather to ask you only a third of the price, if I’m going to hand over my coins to you one at a time in this way.” Ye dear souls! If people’s “yeses” in this world were only always such as your “buts.”