O Heavens, had one but seven-league boots, to get across that inane country,—a bottomless whirlpool of dust and cobwebs in many places;—where, at any rate, we had so little to do! Elucidating, rectifying, painfully contrasting, comparing, let us try to work out some conceivable picture of this strange Imperial MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING; and get our unfortunate Crown-Prince, and our unfortunate selves, alive through it.
Chapter VII. — TOBACCO-PARLIAMENT.
In these distressing junctures, it may cheer the reader's spirits, and will tend to explain for him what is coming, if we glance a little into the Friedrich-Wilhelm TABAGIE (TABAKS-COLLEGIUM or Smoking College), more worthy to be called Tobacco-Parliament, of which there have already been incidental notices. Far too remarkable an Institution of the country to be overlooked by us here.
Friedrich Wilhelm, though an absolute Monarch, does not dream of governing without Law, still less without Justice, which he knows well to be the one basis for him and for all Kings and men. His life-effort, prosecuted in a grand, unconscious, unvarying and instinctive way, may be defined rather as the effort to find out everywhere in his affairs what was justice; to make regulations, laws in conformity with that, and to guide himself and his Prussia rigorously by these. Truly he is not of constitutional turn; cares little about the wigs and formalities of justice, pressing on so fiercely towards the essence and fact of it; he has been known to tear asunder the wigs and formalities, in a notably impatient manner, when they stood between him and the fact. But Prussia has its Laws withal, tolerably abundant, tolerably fixed and supreme: and the meanest Prussian man that could find out a definite Law, coming athwart Friedrich Wilhelm's wrath, would check Friedrich Wilhelm in mid-volley,—or hope with good ground to do it. Hope, we say; for the King is in his own and his people's eyes, to some indefinite extent, always himself the supreme ultimate Interpreter, and grand living codex, of the Laws,—always to some indefinite extent;—and there remains for a subject man nothing but the appeal to PHILIP SOBER, in some rash cases! On the whole, however, Friedrich Wilhelm is by no means a lawless Monarch; nor are his Prussians slaves by any means: they are patient, stout-hearted, subject men, with a very considerable quantity of radical fire, very well covered in; prevented from idle explosions, bound to a respectful demeanor, and especially to hold their tongues as much as possible.
Friedrich Wilhelm has not the least shadow of a Constitutional Parliament, nor even a Privy-Council, as we understand it; his Ministers being in general mere Clerks to register and execute what he had otherwise resolved upon: but he had his TABAKS-COLLEGIUM, Tobacco-College, Smoking Congress, TABAGIE, which has made so much noise in the world, and which, in a rough natural way: affords him the uses of a Parliament, on most cheap terms, and without the formidable inconveniences attached to that kind of Institution. A Parliament reduced to its simplest expression, and, instead of Parliamentary eloquence, provided with Dutch clay-pipes and tobacco: so we may define this celebrated Tabagie of Friedrich Wilhelm's.
Tabagies were not uncommon among German Sovereigns of that epoch: George I. at Hanover had his Smoking-room, and select smoking Party on an evening; and even at London, as we noticed, smoked nightly, wetting his royal throat with thin beer, in presence of his fat and of his lean Mistress, if there were no other company. Tobacco,—introduced by the Swedish soldiers in the Thirty-Years War, say some; or even by the English soldiers in the Bohemian or Palatinate beginnings of said War, say others;—tobacco, once shown them, was enthusiastically adopted by the German populations, long in want of such an article; and has done important multifarious functions in that country ever since. For truly, in Politics, Morality, and all departments of their Practical and Speculative affairs, we may trace its influences, good and bad, to this day.
Influences generally bad; pacificatory but bad, engaging you in idle cloudy dreams;—still worse, promoting composure among the palpably chaotic and discomposed; soothing all things into lazy peace; that all things may be left to themselves very much, and to the laws of gravity and decomposition. Whereby German affairs are come to be greatly overgrown with funguses in our Time; and give symptoms of dry and of wet rot, wherever handled. George I., we say, had his Tabagie; and other German Sovereigns had: but none of them turned it to a Political Institution, as Friedrich Wilhelm did. The thrifty man; finding it would serve in that capacity withal. He had taken it up as a commonplace solace and amusement: it is a reward for doing strenuously the day's heavy labors, to wind them up in this manner, in quiet society of friendly human faces, into a contemplative smoke-canopy, slowly spreading into the realm of sleep and its dreams. Friedrich Wilhelm was a man of habitudes; his evening Tabagie became a law of Nature to him, constant as the setting of the sun. Favorable circumstances, quietly noticed and laid hold of by the thrifty man, developed this simple evening arrangement of his into a sort of Smoking Parliament, small but powerful, where State-consultations, in a fitful informal way, took place; and the weightiest affairs might, by dexterous management, cunning insinuation and manoeuvring from those that understood the art and the place, he bent this way or that, and ripened towards such issue as was desirable.
To ascertain what the true course in regard to this or the other high matter will be; what the public will think of it; and, in short, what and how the Executive-Royal shall DO therein: this, the essential function of a Parliament and Privy-Council, was here, by artless cheap methods, under the bidding of mere Nature, multifariously done; mere taciturnity and sedative smoke making the most of what natural intellect there might be. The substitution of Tobacco-smoke for Parliamentary eloquence is, by some, held to be a great improvement. Here is Smelfungus's opinion, quaintly expressed, with a smile in it, which perhaps is not all of joy:—
"Tobacco-smoke is the one element in which, by our European manners, men can sit silent together without embarrassment, and where no man is bound to speak one word more than he has actually and veritably got to say. Nay, rather every man is admonished and enjoined by the laws of honor, and even of personal ease, to stop short of that point; at all events, to hold his peace and take to his pipe again, the instant he has spoken his meaning, if he chance to have any. The results of which salutary practice, if introduced into Constitutional Parliaments, might evidently be incalculable. The essence of what little intellect and insight there is in that room: we shall or can get nothing more out of any Parliament; and sedative, gently soothing, gently clarifying tobacco-smoke (if the room were well ventilated, open atop, and the air kept good), with the obligation to a MINIMUM of speech, surely gives human intellect and insight the best chance they can have. Best chance, instead of the worst chance as at present: ah me, ah me, who will reduce fools to silence again in any measure? Who will deliver men from this hideous nightmare of Stump-Oratory, under which the grandest Nations are choking to a nameless death, bleeding (too truly) from mouth and nose and ears, in our sad days?"