Augusti and the Minister's lady saw that something must certainly be done for Liana during the Minister's absence; and both wonderfully coincided in their project. Liana must go into the country this pleasant season,—she must muster up health for the wars that were in prospect,—she must be put out of the way of the knight's visits, which now the birthday would multiply fourfold,—even the Minister must have nothing to object to the place. And where can this be? Simply under the roof of the Director Wehrfritz, who cannot endure the German gentleman, because he knows his poisonous relation to the Prince. But of course there are first still other mountains to be climbed than that which lies on the way to Blumenbühl.
The reader himself must now get over a low one; and that is a short comico-tragic Extra-leaf upon
The Green-Market of Daughters.
The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long lain idle, by selling it to a Regent.[150] Strictly and commercially speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod, wherewith one transfers symbolically (scortatione) real estate. "Je ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le marche,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,—and could easily say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by others;—even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not for the sake of the fruits, but because a bee-swarm of lands and people has attached itself thereto.
If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not redeemed.
At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks, however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the higher one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to mount[153] in order to be seen.
It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love; whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction; all is, that now—as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old woman—close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay, often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the article which he has carried home with him,—which is an uncommon piece of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken wares under his arm, thought out his letters upon the affections, so do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this branch of trade, and deal with the virgin—as merchants in Messina[154] do with the holy virgin—in Co.; but of course such profitable connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are little to be counted upon.
The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your daughters friendship for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage, exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself? You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to them; and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly your own; your glory and aggrandizement, your feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage; for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?