"What, then, shall I do? As to accepting presents from my lords, men, year out and year in, I do not respect them enough for that; and the few, whom one does somewhat respect upon occasions, must in their turn respect me too highly to make such an offer. What! shall I be a flea, attached to the thinnest little golden chain, and a gentleman who has fastened me by it, that I may spring with him but not away from him, shall draw me up now and then upon his arm and say, 'Suck away, my little creature!' Devil! I will remain free upon so contemptible an earth,—no salary will I take, no orders in this great servants' apartment,—sound to the core, so as not to awaken any sympathy or any house-doctor,—yes, if one should knock off to me the heart of the Countess Romeiro on the condition of my kneeling down to it, I would take the heart, indeed, and kiss it, but immediately thereupon get up and run away (either into the new world or the next) before she had time to recapitulate the matter to herself and bring it before me.
"As to being something, and thereby earning in proportion, that I could, if one should propose it to me, of course undertake, without any special forfeiture of freedom and disparity. In fact, I see here from my centre three hundred and sixty roads radiate, and I hardly know how to choose among them, so that one would choose rather to flatten out the centre into a circumference, or to seek to draw the latter into the former, so as only to continue standing upon it. Serving, as the staff-officers of the regiments say, were, to be sure, next to commanding. Thou wilt thyself, as thou writest, take the field. (I have duly received thy letter, and found therein thy shyness and passion all right and good, and thyself entire.) And, in truth, if the Archangel Michael were to array a holy legion, a legio fulminatrix of some weak Septuagints, against the commonwealth of the world,—were he to proclaim a giant war against the domineering populace, in order to drive four or five quarters of the world out of the world or into prison by a sixth (on an island there would be good room for it), and to make all spiritual slaves bodily ones,—be assured, in that happy case I would plant myself foremost in the van, and would bring on the cannon, with the short, flying remark, that, as Handel first introduced cannon into music, so here for the first time, inversely, they were bringing music into cannon. When we at length came back in a body,—when the holy militia again swept hitherward,—then would God's throne stand upon the earth, and holy men, with lofty fires in their hands, should go up, much less to rule therefrom the world's body than to sacrifice to the soul of the worlds.
"With the flower of France, then, thou wilt, as thou writest, for thy individual self, for one man, hereafter stand up. Of course it is hard for me to think highly of five and twenty millions, of which it is true the cubic root must have grown and run up freely, but stem and twig have, after all, for whole centuries, been drying and withering in a slave's dungeon. He who was not, before the Revolution, a silent Revolutionist,—somewhat as Chamfort was, against whose fire-proof breast I once in Paris struck fire with mine, or like Montesquieu and J. J. Rousseau,—let him not, with his silly spatterings, spread himself out far beyond his house-door. Freedom, like everything godlike, is not learned and acquired, but inborn. Of course, all over France and Germany there sit young authors and sons of the muses, who admire and proclaim their own sudden worth, only they are cursedly astonished that they had not earlier felt their sense of freedom,—soft, sickly knaves, who look upon themselves as complete blowing whales, because they have found some bone or other of the said fish, and buckled it to their ribs. I should always, in a war such as these dead times can furnish, believe that I was fighting against fools, indeed, but for fools too.
"The cynical, naive, free nature's-men of the present day—Franks and Germans—are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked, white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their diminutive bodies, have called themselves sansculottes (men without breeches).
"Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the penknife, and, as writing Cæsar, rise, to better the world, and be useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. 'Every one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else would lie buried,' said the German librarian. 'To constitute a native land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some land,' said I. 'The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks, first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a glassful of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one's self withal. The scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pass from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in one,—mine,—and there remains.'
"'Droll enough!' said the universal German librarian. 'With such a humor as this only connect the study of bad men and good models, and then you create for us a second Rabener, to scourge fools.' 'Sir,' replied I, in a rage, 'I should prefer to transfer the first blow to the backs of the wise ones and you. Philosophers suffer themselves to be enlightened and washed, have always their insight into things, and are good fools, and just my people. Let a man like a universal German farrier, who takes the pulse of the muses' horse, holds his out to me, and I will feel it with great pleasure. But the rest and refuse of the world, sir? Who can skim off the world sea, if he does not break away its banks? Is it not a sorrow and a shame that all men of genius, from Plato even to Herder, have become noisy, and die printed, and frequently read and studied by the learned rabble and custom-house, without having the least power to change them? Librarian, call and whistle out, I pray you, all that lies in the critical dog-kennels on the watch beside those temples, and ask the whole body of greyhounds, bulldogs, and boar-hounds whether anything else is stirring in their souls than a potentiated maw, instead of a poetic and holy heart? In the mountain-cauldron they see the pudding-pot and brewer's-kettle, in the leaves the spades[[112]] on the play-cards, and the thunder has for them, as a greater electric spark, a very sour taste, which it afterward infuses into the March beer.'
"'Do you mean any allusion?' he asked. 'Assuredly!' said I. 'But further, Librarian, suppose we too were so lucky as to turn on our heels, and, with one whirl of a breath, to blow over all fools, as if they were infected with an arsenical fume, and lay them dead as a mouse: I cannot see, for all that, where the blessing is coming out, because, besides that we are still standing before each other, and have to breathe on ourselves too, I see, in all corners round about, women sitting, who will hatch the slain world anew.'
"'My dear fellow, best pair of bellows,[[113]] full of fire,' I continued, 'can this, however, call and stamp one very strongly to be of the satirical handicraft? O no! This is genuine humor with me, perhaps strange madness, also, perhaps—but O, will not the rare joke-maker, even in your uncommon library, resemble the porcupine-man in London (the son) who had the office under the beast-dealer, Brook, of acting as Cicerone to the stranger among the wild stock and through the park of outlandish beasts, and who commenced on the threshold with the observation that he showed himself as one of the species man? Consider it coolly and first of all! I still swing my satirical horsetail loosely and merrily, and perhaps against an occasional horse-fly; but let a book be tied to it, as in Poland they tie a cradle to the cow's tail, and the beast shall rock the cradle of the readers and give pleasure; the tail, however, becomes a slave.'
"'To such images,' said the Librarian, 'sure enough, the cultivated world could never be accustomed by any Rabener or Voltaire, and I now perceive myself that satire is not your department.' 'O, most true!' replied I, and we parted on very good terms.
"But to take things seriously, brother, what is there now left for a man (in the shape of prospects as well as of wishes) to whom the age is so over-salted and so bitter and briny as it is to me, and to whom life is made so by living men,—who is annoyed to death with the universal insipid hypocrisy and the glistening polish of the most poisonous wood,—and the horrible commonness of the German life-theatre, and the still greater commonness of the German theatre-life,—and the Pontine marshes of infamous and immoral Kotzebuean weakliness, which no Holy Father can drain and make into sound land,—and the murdered pride, together with the living vanity, that stalk about, so that I, only for the sake of drawing breath, can betake myself for whole hours to the plays of children and of cattle, because there I am assured, at least, that neither of them are coquetting with me, that, on the contrary, they have nothing in mind and are in love with nothing but their work,—what is there left, I asked at the top of this page, for one in whose nostrils, as was said, so many sorts of things stink, and especially this further particular, that improvement is hard, but deterioration not so by any means, because even the best do somewhat impose upon the worst, and thereby on themselves too, and because with their secret cursings of the age, and trimming and truckling to it, they dance at least for gold and glory, and in consideration thereof willingly let themselves be used by the more steady mass, as wine-casks are used for meat-barrels,—what is there, friend, I say, for a man in times when, as now, one makes in print, not black white, indeed, but yet gray, and where one, as good catechists must, always avoids precisely the question, yes or no,—what remains except hatred of tyrants and slaves at once, and indignation at the maltreated no less than at the maltreatment? And what shall a man to whom the armor of life in such situations is worked thin or worn thin, seriously resolve upon?"