"This parsimony the imperfect character alloyed still more with some degree of deception. He interpolated the articles which he had received in good condition, and wrote back he had received them in a bad condition, they were so and so, and he could only allow for them half price. A third of the price he thus by a clever enough legerdemain whisked out of the buyer's distant pocket. Wares, casks, bags, which had in his house only a relay-station and were to travel on farther, paid out to him a transit-toll through a little hole he made in them, by way of paying himself therefrom the little which might be charged to the carrier if it was missed. He got up a mint-cabinet or hospital for poor amputated invalid gold pieces. To other depreciated coins he gave back the honorable name which they had lost, and compelled his factors to accept them as legitimated and rehabilitated. No matter in how bad a condition a gold piece might have come into his house, he treated it as an officer and never dismissed it without promotion. Thus do such nobler souls cover even the faults of money with the mantle of Charity.
"In this way his commercial stock and real estate enlarged more and more, and in his heart, brooded over by the friendly warmth of the public, there stirred, like an infusorium in its egg, a faint, featherless, transparent thing, which he called Honor. The imperfect character appropriated to himself, therefore, the character of commercial counsellor.
"And now, when he had caught honor fairly by the wing and fixed it upon paper, he could more readily offend against it than before, when he had it not yet among his papers. He accordingly made his declaration of love to the richest and most avaricious father of a beautiful daughter, whose love for another--an officer--had already led her to take the last step. The daughter hated his declaration of love; but the character with the aid of the father, possessed himself of her struggling hand, drew her by it to the altar, screwed on the ring, and impaled her hand in his. Her second child was his first.[[44]]
"Meanwhile as his honor, after these bleedings and voidings, could not well be kept on its feet, he had to be thinking about hanging on its neck a good, strengthening amulet, Loyola's-metallic-plate, a manifesto-of-Luke-and-Agatha--a diploma of nobility. His honor was happily restored to health by the Imperial Chancery of Vienna.
"As he had no community of goods with his wife, but only with his creditors, he released himself from the mercantile profession by an innocent failure and found a refuge for himself and his clear conscience and his wife's goods and his own at his country seat, in order there to serve his God.
"I mean his Gods;--friends, the imperfect character had none. His ideas of friendship were too noble and lofty, and demanded the purest and most disinterested love and devotion on a friend's part; hence he was disgusted with the low blockheads around him, who desired not his heart but his purse, and who pressed him to their bosoms merely that they might squeeze something out of him. He could not so much as bear to have such selfishness in his presence, and his house, therefore, like the human windpipe and Sparta, could not bear to have in it any foreign thing. He believed with Montaigne, that no one could properly love more than one friend, as well as one mistress; hence he bestowed his heart upon a single person, whom of all he prized most highly--namely his own--this he had tried and proved; its disinterested love for him it was that enabled him to attain Cicero's ideal, who wrote, that one could do for a friend anything, even base things, which one would not do for himself.
"He is the greatest stoic in all the territory of Scheerau; he not merely says that all pleasures are vanity, but he even despises all temporal good, because it cannot make him happy. This contempt of such is not indeed to be supposed inconsistent with the most earnest striving after it, because a philosophor, as the stoics in the note[[45]] say, will prefer a life in whose furniture there is so much left as a wire-brush or a stable-broom, to one in which merely this little were wanting, although he is not made any the happier thereby. Hence the imperfect character sets as much store by the least effects (as old Shandy did by the least truths) as by the greatest; accordingly he must make his fire of nut-shells, seal his letters with wax torn off from old ones, write his own letters on the blank spaces in those of his correspondents, etc. The Imperfect Character has herein a resemblance to the miser, who makes a profit out of similar trifles, and whom no reasons can refute; for if I may not throw away a penny, I may not a farthing, half a farthing, 1000th of a farthing; the reasons are the same.
"There is in man a terrible tendency to avarice. The greatest prodigal might be made something still worse, the greatest niggard, if one should give him so much as to make him account it much and worth increasing; and so vice versâ. So the dropsical craves more water the more he is swollen with it; as his water ebbs, his thirst ebbs with it.
"The imperfect character thanks heaven for two things: first, that he has fallen into no avarice, secondly, into no extravagance--that he does not deny his wife or his child anything, gives them everything, and only in the case of stupid people, who want to have means of prodigality, takes such means out of their hands, as the old Germans, the Arab and the Otaheitans steal from strangers only, but never from inhabitants--that he is chaste and would sooner untie the money-purse of a merchant than the girdle of Venus--that if he had as many pennies as such or such a one, he would fly to the help of the poor in a very different manner--but nevertheless he no more allows himself to be robbed of his bit than the mourner does of his sorrow, and that at the Last Day the question will be put to him, whether he has gained interest on his pound (sterling).
"This vendible character in the publishing office is, like an English malefactor, stock and seller at once, and will expect nothing of the romance writer for his whole being except a copy gratis of the romance into which he is thrown."