BOHN’S STANDARD LIBRARY.
RICHTER’S
FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.
GEORGE BELL & SONS
LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND
BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD
CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.
FLOWER, FRUIT AND THORN PIECES;
OR, THE
WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE
OF
FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,
PARISH ADVOCATE
IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
(A GENUINE THORN PIECE.)
BY
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
Translated from the German
BY
ALEXANDER EWING.
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1897
[Reprinted from Stereotype plates.]
PREFACE
TO THE
SECOND EDITION.
What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition of ‘Siebenkæs,’ embellished and perfected as it is with all the additions, corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power to make? Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I daresay, buy it and read it; but not give much of their time to the study of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in their criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been chary of her oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other inquirers; she has chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them, and prophesied little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers setting to work, for instance, at the second edition of his ‘Hesperus,’[[1]] with his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist’s knife in his right, and applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent; it was in vain, however, that he looked for anything like an appreciative notice of it, either in literary or non-literary publications. Similarly, in all his new editions (those of ‘Fixlein,’ the ‘Preparatory School,’ and ‘Levana,’ are proofs and witnesses[[2]]), however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, turning some of the old ones’ faces to the wall—marching off some ideas, relieving them by others—making characters conduct themselves better, or worse, or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be,—the deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to the world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told where I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am minus, perhaps, some little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.
This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic class think none are necessary—their common point of agreement being the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides, the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the wax for it.
Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its author’s fancy—just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all. Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do so as follows:—firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise in a more roundabout form, as follows:—If a writer curbs himself too closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible perspiration of criticism—then they say—“the fact is, that the thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots, penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far.” But, when the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when and how they will, then the critics point the following moral—doing it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of them—“A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he lets it go.”
We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition appeared, I have had the good fortune—partly because I have had an opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul’s letters), partly from my correspondence with the hero of it himself—of becoming acquainted with family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I could not have got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and coolly invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to communicate to the public.
The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be filled by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of all the genitive final s’s of compound words. But really the labour of sweeping and striking out letters and words all through four long volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as by the sweeper and striker-out himself.
Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have placed both the “Flower-pieces” at the end of the second volume[[3]] (for in the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first), and that it is no longer the first volume, but, much more appropriately, the second, which closes with the first Fruit-piece.
And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces—particularly in that of the Dead Christ—I have not made any improvements, but left everything as it was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the golden writing-sand with which I had made the letters a little rough and illegible.
The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be so glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the increasing of my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as there could not be a more troublesome business than the comparing of the old book with the improved one, page by page, as it were, I have deposited in the school-book shop the printed copy of the old edition, in which all the writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is to say, all the places which have been written or stroked through, can be easily seen at a glance, often half and whole pages done to death, so that it would really astonish you. Critics not on the spot must, indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of each of the editions into the opposite scales of a grocer’s balance, and then looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old. From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all critics may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my first; they may also form an idea how much I struck out of my manuscript before printing, when they observe how much I have struck out after printing.
Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Bayreuth, September, 1817.
CONTENTS.
[PREFACE to the Second Edition]
[PREFACE], with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the “Dog Post Days,” and these present “Flower-Pieces,” &c., &c., to his Daughter
[Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S. Siebenkæs.]
[A Genuine Thorn Piece.]
[BOOK I.]
[CHAPTER I.]
A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite—The Counterparts—Dish Quintette in two Courses—Table-talk—Six Arms and Hands.
[CHAPTER II.]
Home Fun—Sundry formal Calls—The Newspaper Article—A Love Quarrel, and a few hard words—Antipathetic ink on the wall—Friendship of the Satirists—Government of Kuhschnappel.
[Appendix to Chapter II.]
Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.
[CHAPTER III.]
Lenette’s Honeymoon—Book Brewing—Schulrath Stiefel—Mr. Everard—A Day before the Fair—The Red Cow—St. Michael’s Fair—The Beggars’ Opera—Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or the Mannikin of Fashion—Autumn Joys—A New Labyrinth.
[CHAPTER IV.]
A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre—Letter to that Hair Collector, the Venner—Self-deceptions—Adam’s Marriage Sermon—Shadowing and Over-shadowing.
[End of the Preface and of the First Book.]
[PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.]
[PREFACE by the Author of ‘Hesperus’.]
[BOOK II.]
[CHAPTER V.]
The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements—The Importance of a Bookwriter—Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the subject of Candle Snuffing—The Pewter Cupboard—Domestic Hardships and Enjoyments.
[CHAPTER VI.]
Matrimonial Jars—Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women—More Pledging—The Mortar and the Snuff-mill—A Scholar’s Kiss—On the Consolations of Humanity.
[Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter VI.]
The Checked Calico Dress—More Pledges—Christian Neglect of the Study of Judaism—A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from the Clouds—The Auction.
[CHAPTER VII.]
The Shooting-Match—Rosa’s Autumnal Campaign—Considerations concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
Scruples as to Payment of Debts—The Rich Pauper’s Sunday Throne-ceremonial—Artificial Flowers on the Grave—New Thistle Seedlings of Contention.
[First Flower Piece.]
The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.
[Second Flower piece.]
A Dream within a Dream.
[BOOK III.]
[CHAPTER IX.]
A Potato War with Women—and with Men—A Walk in December—Tinder for Jealousy—A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of checked calico—Rupture with Stiefel—Sad Evening Music.
[CHAPTER X.]
A Lonely New-Year’s Day—The Learned Schalaster—Wooden-leg of Appeal—Chamber Postal Delivery—The 11th of February, and Birth-day of the year 1786.
[CHAPTER XI.]
Leibgeber’s Disquisition on Fame—Firmian’s “Evening Paper”.
[CHAPTER XII.]
The Flight out of Egypt—The Glories of Travel?—The Unknown Bayreuth—Baptism in a Storm—Nathalie and the Hermitage—The most important Conversation in all this Book—An Evening of Friendship.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
A Clock of Human Beings—A Cold Shoulder—The Venner.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
A Lover’s Dismissal—Fantaisie—The Child with the Bouquet—The Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.
[First Fruit Piece.]
Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of I into Thou, He, She, Ye, and They; or the Feast of Kindness of the 20th March.
[BOOK IV.]
[CHAPTER XV.]
Rosa von Meyern—Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest of all Nights—Letters of Nathalie and Firmian—Table-talk by Leibgeber.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures—The Arrival at Home.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar—Thorn-crowns, and Thistle-heads of Jealousy.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
After-Summer of Marriage—Preparations for Death.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
The Apparition—Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last Quarrel—The Raiment of the Children of Israel.
[CHAPTER XX.]
Apoplexy—The President of the Board of Health—The Notary-Public—The last Will and Testament—The Knight’s Move—Revel, the Morning Preacher—The Second Apoplectic Attack.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
Dr. Œlhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking—The Burial Society—A Death’s Head in the Saddle—Frederick II. and his Funeral Oration.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
Journey through Fantaisie—Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain—Berneck—Man-doubling—Gefrees—Exchange of Clothes—Münchberg—Solo-whistling—Hof—The Stone of Gladness and Double-parting.
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
Days in Vaduz—Nathalie’s Letter—A New Year’s Wish—Wilderness of Destiny and the Heart.
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
News from Kuhschnappel—Woman’s Anticlimax—Opening of the Seventh Seal.
[CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.]
The Journey—The Churchyard—The Spectre—The End of the Trouble, and of the Book.
PREFACE,
WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE “DOG POST DAYS”[[4]] AND THESE PRESENT “FLOWER-PIECES,” &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.
On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold—being the 24th of December—the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-passenger (a “blind” one[[5]]), by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense, such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady preface-maker—Oehrmann’s daughter and shop-girl—already at work making oral prefaces to the little books she was selling—Christmas almanacs of the best of all kinds—duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver ages—I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf, with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or silvers them over like the winter. I don’t blame the poor shop-wench that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers, she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and, although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in to her father at once.
All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency) more than the debit side. The man’s attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who, like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and envoyés, namely, commercial travellers—to them, I say, it makes little difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens to arrive from.
Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall here be made the reader’s property.
I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts—into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in business—that true corpus callosum of the German empire—buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of body), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his ‘Enumeration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,’ has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of “wizard” and “witchmaster,”—whose spiritus rector and grand master seems to have been the devil himself—having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official positions—can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment—(if he did he would no longer be “born,” he would be “made” by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases—and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never copious enough or condensed enough. At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny, jerking water-wagtails.
The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there’s nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.
The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one or two more—an author has little need to trouble himself about their votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don’t read him. At all events, they don’t deserve the dedication with which I, at the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my ‘Hesperus,’ or the ‘Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,’ to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:—
Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o’clock. Soon after this, by scraping and pinching, he became a “pretty rich house” (though he kept a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated, promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say, the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a watchful corps of observation, insisted upon making him their captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only makes a beginning at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors, and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre’s through magic vapour.
Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of portable miniature of it—like itself, he cares only for bread-studies, and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but politics—he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it—the tourmaline only to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater attractive power than either)—he knows no higher thing in the world than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than the waste-book and the ledger.
“May I be d—d,” thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, “if I can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it couldn’t possibly know what I meant” it occurred to me; and on account of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another plan.
Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her father’s, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)—from being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time, I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked (together with the latter) to stay to supper.
Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of Germany about my ears—aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially for the purpose—I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came, and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive, was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his foreign mail days, when it didn’t take much to put him to sleep.
On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and abridge my “45 Dog Post Days” into the space of about the same number of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration necessary.
I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried “let the author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us.” Indeed, had these gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and had they then seen, or more properly, nearly lost sight of, that gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls and gold are the softer and the more impressionable the purer they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves, and the snoring father——
Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone on with in a calmer mood.
I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two stoppages of payment—my opinions on the French War, and the high prices of everything—that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in length—that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade, in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the “revising barristers” of and “lodgers of appeals” against the newspaper writers; that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail themselves of these resurrected ones in the next “affaire;” whilst the soldiers’ children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock’s orthographical rule, only to write what you hear.
When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann’s cradle. My ‘Hesperus’ is too big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars—then introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the Laws of Nature, seeing that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply—from this point I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose, attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann’s soul (his body) the following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists among the princes of Germany. “I do not mean as regards the animal world,” I continued slowly and tediously. “Kartesius, as we know, is of opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently, man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this—do not the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality of a realm consists in Extension, as Kartesius holds that of matter to do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does of matter, that its essentiality consists in Solidity.”
He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad awake as you please, “There are only two of them that can pay their way—the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of——”
At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and set to work printing her brothers’ names at full length upon their shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.
Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in pumping out what follows.
“I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed or explicit manner with my two latest opuscula, or little works; the elder of the two is, curiously enough, called ‘Dog Post Days,’ and the later ‘Flower-pieces.’ Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it’s my fault alone, and nobody else’s, if you find you don’t quite know what the first of the two may be about—whether you are to suppose it to be a work on heraldry or on insects—or a dictionary of some particular dialect—or an ancient codex—or a Lexicon Homericum—or a collection of inaugural disputations—or a ready reckoner—or an epic poem—or a volume of funeral sermons. It really is nothing but an interesting story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book’s favour that there are parts of it to be found—I hope not very many—in which there are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case), though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which so often seem as if they really must have been written by the old artless knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)—that my attempts, I say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do not offend the ears of the great—but only those of the chaste—are not considered the most objectionable.”
I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to a quite different topic, saying, “it is probably the safest way of all, to have improper books deposited in public libraries, where the librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from being read than an edict of the censorship.” But Jacobus would speak out his thought, “Pauline, don’t let me forget that the woman Stenzin hasn’t paid her fine yet.”
It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five minutes’ time, than a man of business in as many hours.
Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one the following letters from her letterbox: “STORY”—i. e. she wanted to be told the “Dog Post Days” that evening.
So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: “The fact is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my ‘Post Days’ may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons’ names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way of a comforting thought was this very natural one, ‘Devil make a better of it all!’ Only he’s just the very last person to do it. For, good heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments of universal world history are only being tuned in the orchestra before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much better than the opera itself)—in such an age, when it is so hard to tell the coward from the brave man—him who lets everything go as it pleases from him who strives to do something great and good—those who are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit, just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the dead ones—in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author, one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that, after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue, love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun, he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of the pictures have fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth, then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are incapable of business can work for the press.”
“There’s work, and there’s work,” the merchant, wide awake, struck in; “it all depends—Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn’t much better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging—not meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of books—arithmetic books, and so on.”
The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me, because my business was only the making of books, though in old days I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many people take of the convenances of society; but I think anyone on earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the fellow’s impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately and without abridgment, my “extra leaflets” from my ‘Hesperus.’
This, of course, was bound to put him to death—sleep, I mean.
And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the author—then commenced our feast of unleavened bread—then I could sit down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and besieged by sermons—which cannot refresh itself at so much as a birthday ball, were it only the superintendent’s and his wife’s, nor with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of some mesh in the nun’s veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern land—to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes—to lift her beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery—to set it free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer growth than those of the country round.
I had just finished by one o’clock. I had taken only three hours to the three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the “extra leaves.” “If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that’s not purely historical,” I said, and sacrificed my most precious digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is not quite the proper soil.
Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o’clock it was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week, on New Year’s Eve.
My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening, because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my “Flower-pieces”—this very book.
I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the evening exactly as they occurred.
I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters which I had—NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau on the New Year’s Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to lay before my dear Pauline some more Paulina, namely these sketches, because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her counter, these wouldn’t be among them—I consider that no editor who has any principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my having duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent soul-flower the Flower-pieces, two dreams made of flowers put together mosaic-fashion—next the Thorn-pieces,[[6]] from which I had to break away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little to do.
But near as it was to the time for wishing new year’s wishes, the old year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.
Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere pasquinade into the nobler satire: “I always picture lawyers and clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of engine for quenching money thirst—the one row, the clients, always passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row standing and handing each other buckets or purses full,” said I.
I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own—for he is a small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say to the following ideas.
“The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of export trade only; the attic salt they have a taste for, is that which Benkelszoon used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided Erasmus, in consideration of his salt (of a better quality), with a statue (he never ate salt, by the way), yet I think this was excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to the fish-curer in question. Even Campe, who by no means classes the inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I say that the German is really being made something of at the present day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded fellow—a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful follies, who knows edible from cogitable matter (when he sees it), and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important) from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can’t bear the noise of any poet’s harp whatever, were it strung with the harper’s own heart-strings—and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[[7]] nor any printing except calico-printing.”
Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he was dead.[[8]]
Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened, speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual diminuendo of my tone, as follows:—“And of such a public as this, I quite expect that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above altar-pieces,[[9]] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all will be, ‘is the fellow solvent?’ And further, my beloved listener (I continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the sleeper by any change in the kind of sound), it is to be hoped and expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this evening, if he (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long enough.”
I commenced, accordingly, as follows:—
P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the book itself, printed over again in the preface! At the end of book the first, however, I shall give the continuation and conclusion of this preface, and of the New Year’s Eve, and shall then go on with the second book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair.
Jean Paul Fr. Richter.
Hof, 7th November, 1796.
WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE
OF
F. S. SIEBENKÆS,
Parish Advocate in the royal burgh of Kuhschnappel.
A GENUINE THORN PIECE.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE—THE COUNTERPARTS—DISH QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES—TABLE-TALK—SIX ARMS AND HANDS.
Siebenkæs, parish advocate[[10]] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel, had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going to church for the wedding.
The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg, had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.
She was an Augspurger by birth—only daughter of the deceased Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council—and she lived in the Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by her own work, not on other people’s, as penisoned court-ladies’-maids do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on; and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days’ notice, on a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of them.
All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more than once) that it was the devil who invented seeking, and his grandmother who devised waiting. At length, while it was still pretty early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady “could not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates.”
Siebenkæs’s butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather’s leather arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar considers the mere arranging of his books and papers to be a purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish advocate, saying further, “orderliness is, properly defined, nothing but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty years in the old place, let that place be where it will.”
Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an excellent arrangement, inasmuch as—most of the people of the house being working-men—their play Monday and his fell together; for it was only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.
I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the poor (a fit candidate for his own services in that capacity). But I have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero’s guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200 Rhenish guldens (i.e. 100l.), to say nothing of the interest. Only, unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense, tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar’s scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented) himself in going on to say, “It is easier to bear poverty like Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves alone.” Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts, and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her reception (for such he considered his 100l. with the accumulated interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what little he could scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. “I’ll be handed,” he had long ago said, “if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon, to whom they sign away their souls—often their child—that the evil one may give them money and eatables.”
This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense). Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded, while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.
“Your worthy intended,” he said, “is coming directly. She is getting ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true woman, in Solomon’s sense of the term, and I congratulate you most heartily.”
“The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?—I can conduct you to him myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment,” said the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up: but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him with a hesitating step into the advocate’s room. She held out her right hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom, and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes, mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet—there being barely time to get one’s hair done and be married—and laid her garland, which she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered for the ceremony (as a person’s of quality ought to be) by the landlord, thus conveniently at hand.
Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for everyone whom she’s not going to many, a poor meagre piece of shewbread—and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour, namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress, overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with others like them, fate is soon to pluck away—and with anxious pious eyes overflowing on her mother’s heart for the last and loveliest time; this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. “Thou heart, beating high with happiness,” I think then, “not always wilt thou throb thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own heel.” And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, “Do not so begrudge the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy and brightness now?”
I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into the “remote key” of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette’s myrtle wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking round her to see which way she was going to be led by them——
I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful how he carried about that heart of his—so full to the brim of the potion of love, and tears of gladness—lest it should run over in the presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn’t masking himself sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber’s mate, and commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she didn’t think her room “nicely situated,” and saying, “I can see into the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their value, and very handsome they are, don’t you think so? My good old grandfather’s chair here, though” (he had sat down in it, and laid his lean arms on the chair’s stuffed ones), “does, I think, take the precedence in the grandfather dance:[[11]] ‘how they so softly rest,’ arm upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin ‘Meditations’ is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though, is the place—better still than this room; there are pots, all ranged side by side—and all sorts of things—the hare-skinner and the hare-spit—my father used to shoot the hares for these.”
The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she had heard the greater part of the story of the 100l. (with interest) in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to her.
It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat, and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous occasion, “We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for lost flatteries.”
The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.
I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps; and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown), especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who, according to Swedenborg’s vision, always merge into one angel—although on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and that a fallen one—the husband (who is the head of the wife) representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.
For there appears there, looking down at us—and we all looking up at it—Siebenkæs’s spirit, as the popular expression has it, i.e. his body, as it ought to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he might turn pale, and think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only turns red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, having many years ago vowed to travel any distance to his marriage, solely that he might laugh at him for twelve hours’ time.
There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all pettiness and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation with dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to the voice of the multitude, but not to that of honour; these are but some of the first at hand of the similarities which made of these two but one soul doing duty in two bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers in their studies, having for nurses the same branches of knowledge, including the Law herself, I do not reckon among their chief resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of study becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not even the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic harshnesses). But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed alike, these two men’s souls had put on just the same frock-coat and morning costume of life; I mean, two bodies of identical fashion, colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both had the same flash of the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the same tallness, leanness, and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it when some prince or great person casts a corporeal reflection.
For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and dissolved away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe its last above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a turned-up comet’s tail, of an ass’s ear in short. Partly from friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the scenes of absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise to in every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian and surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each wanted to be the other’s namesake, till at length they settled the difference by exchanging names, thus following the example of the natives of Otaheite, among whom the lovers exchange names as well as hearts.
As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his worthy name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy name in exchange, I can’t do anything to alter this in my chapters. I must go on calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the beginning, and the other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary for any reviewer to point out to me that the more comic name of Siebenkæs would have been better suited to this more humoristic newcomer, with whom, however, the world shall yet be better acquainted than I am myself.
When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church, their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view of the bride’s profile. This cutting out of likenesses he generally gave out as being his cookshop and bakery upon his perpetual journeyings; and as it appears that this strange man does not choose to disclose upon what eminences the waters gather which well up for him down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my own belief in) a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting—“In the process of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white; but in clipping black paper, whether profiles or white mourning letters with black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is versed in the liberal art of painting his fellow Christian blacker than he is—with more members than one—the tongue for instance can do it to some extent—then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man’s bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), till her arm is half crippled.”
While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony was over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a separation of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy speech:—
“Good morning, Siebenkæs.”
They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed; and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as he did to-day,—
“Good morning, Leibgeber.”
The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an easy matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an impossibility to the tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be to the humorous sides of matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at the sight of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new labyrinth of our subterranean existence.
I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that it is neither in my power nor in my pen’s to half portray, and that in a feeble style, how the guests—there were almost as many there as there were chairs—enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover, there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom’s guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day before the closing of the gate; how not only was there one course served up, but a second, a “Doppelgänger.” To anyone, indeed, who has dined at great men’s tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs (the hairdresser’s wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided for the first course.
1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre had in the convent—that is to say, merely the tail.
2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.
3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the butcher’s shop, sweetly treated.
4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.
5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.
I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly sketching for them a little “cookery-piece” of the second course.
1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy’s fire, more fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic figure consisted of a calf’s tongue, which was black, not from arguing, but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter; these three glorified bodies, which, like “the three children,” had come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls, were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests, with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.
This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century, a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:—“This day was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25s.). That’s what I call banquetting!” But what would the Saxon treasurer have written? how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in my very first chapter that a poor’s advocate had gone and spent three gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!
As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events, could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;—joking with them, and actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which he had made on a similar occasion.
Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in the lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end without accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of conversation that the only thing there generally is not enough of, is beer. “Oh!” he went on, “if everyone of our condition would but think of it, he would but envy those of a lower; how accurately, in a figurative sense too, does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden house is easier warmed than a stone one—and the stone one again doesn’t get cool so soon as the wooden in summer—or as coarse brown flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who wear diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there who get their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones, gathered by himself as a substitute for fir-fuel” (here the fuel economising company thought vividly of their own case), “is often quite as well off on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in sugar and eat them.”
“Friend Parish Advocate,” said Leibgeber, “there you hit it! In the tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow, the kick, the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with the reckoning. The reverse is the case in the palace; in a ‘palais’ for the ‘palais’ everybody’s enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same instant; just as the little Aphides on the leaves all lift up their tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same moment,[[12]] in the palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and sociability. Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it to operate by licking it slowly off.”
And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become greater. Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the privilege of drink, and of the special inquisition, to say “Thou” to one another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and smiled in a seductive manner, as elderly maiden ladies do in the presence of elderly single gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at home a couple of real Horatian bottles of champagne. “Not sparkling then, I’m sure?” Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The Schulrath, who thought the best kind of champagne exactly the worst, replied with some self-consciousness, “If it isn’t sparkling, well and good, I swear I’ll drink every drop of it myself.” The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain, removed the cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.
What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life, namely wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the very topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower out of the watering pot of these said bottles—in three minutes they will begin to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and glow while fair air-castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many tinted were the floating bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath Stiefel’s ideas of all categories, his simple as well as his compound ideas, his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except on the subject of Lenette’s perfections, and that he told Leibgeber in confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed, “the tenth Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus—for it was clear who had got her already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation or other of hers.” During the whole journey, he said, he had preached from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the subject of the blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in the brightest colours, and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he quite longed to enter into it himself: and the bridegroom would have thanked him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him in return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, and happy in all she did that day, and particularly that evening; and what became her best of all was that on such a high day as this, she waited upon others more than she let herself be waited upon—that she put on a light every-day dress—that even at this advanced stage of her own education she took private lessons in cookery and household matters from her female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects—and that she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed his left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that of its plush sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle before the whole company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole; somewhat like a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at arm’s length to a high branch and snipping off the whole concern by a slight movement of his hand at the bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out to give him a profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away, he even made an attempt (but this was the only one of his ventures which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.
At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down like their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into the night. The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last there was only one guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest), and one long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the loud clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself away into silence, and just one or two, left alone, sit quietly, often sadly, listening to the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath struck the last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and departed; but he would not for a moment suffer that those fingers, which, in spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should be clasped about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife, for the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.
Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel, dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee reach even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.
The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied, that his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing energetic, active effort; not a smooth, regular, “handsome” one: and as, moreover, he always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he supposed it would strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was that, although as an every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and tongues of a whole street (not even taking the pains mentally to snap his fingers at them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage to kiss his Leibgeber—let alone Lenette. And now he pressed her hand more closely, and in a dauntless manner turned his face to hers (for, you see, they were in the dark, and he couldn’t see her); and he wished the staircase had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber might be a long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden there danced (so to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and—then all the flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride’s duty to give this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the fire wherewith love, wine and joy had endowed him; but—so strange is her sex—she turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her cheek. And there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette’s cheeks, and thence into her trembling heart. She leant her face further away; but in her beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her.
He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom—that butterfly-dust which the very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon our fingers (and hence it was a good idea of Pitt’s to put a tax on powder in 1795)—told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and the bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two friends looked for some time at each other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, “Hem! Hem!” twice over, and at length, in his perplexity, remarked, “We’ve had a delightful evening!” He took up a position behind the bridegroom’s chair, to be out of sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself no longer; he stood up, resigned the bride’s hand, and the two friends, at last, after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment of their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with Heaven all around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would fain have widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his bride and his friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took each one side of him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens opened in glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God, love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which hangs on all our joy-flowers, here below.
In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to look into each other’s tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in silence, without a word of parting or good night.
CHAPTER II.
HOME FUN—SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS—THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE—A LOVE QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS—ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL—FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS—GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in the hands of his diligent house goddess—who put a cap on to her cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself—the silver ingots from his guardian’s coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn’t do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. “I can give you no notion, old Leibgeber,” said Siebenkæs, “what a joy I feel in looking forward to how this will delight my wife. I’m sure, to give her pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she will consider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over—there shall be a good half-florin’s worth of beer in every room in the house. Look here! why shouldn’t the dove, or call him the sparrow, of my hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort does wine at a coronation?” Leibgeber answered, “The reason he can’t is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine (of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins—the feathers, the wool, and the hair which eagles always eject.”
It would be of no use whatever—because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers would correct my statement in their local paper, the ‘Imperial News’—if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.
Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company of the “Relaxation” as the club was called. “This,” he said, “was what he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in any rational manner at night in one’s ordinary quiet bed was a thing which he, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear one’s self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at once—the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes nothing but an ultima, perhaps, or sometimes only an antepenultima; this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout—your barometer becomes completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm.”
One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say, “Many thanks for this refreshing rest.”
However, I have little to do with Leibgeber’s waking or with his sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence, seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.
To mention but one prank—was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that, when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound “Saufinder” (he couldn’t live without a big dog) look out of window with a fashionable lady’s night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs’s part, that he took lemons and bit into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end aimed at by both the advocates?
But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur, Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all fours.
Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days—not wholly in a disorderly manner—in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on which of course there was nothing but the words, “Mr. Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor’s Advocate, and his wife, née Engelkraut; with compliments.”—with these papers, and with the lady, they were both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren, Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else, conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs’s zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place, in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his travels.
So they drove about the town on the Saturday—and where anybody in the shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers’ tickets and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the greater and lesser council—to the seventy members of the greater, and the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say, tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members—these constituting the said lesser council—each received his card. After which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government officials in the various chambers and offices with their cards, such as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a very nice old man.
I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town, though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and statistical world. However, I can’t possibly pull up here in the full gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it, when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.
The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs’s marriage to the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre, barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the Heimlicher’s wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)—
“My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he’s away from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[[13]] he is tutor and guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You had better be off as fast as you like; you’ve got hold of the wrong man here.”
“I quite think we have, myself,” said Leibgeber.
Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them: and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, “You’re quite sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any venomous ‘objections’ which the guardian might make to paying up your money, on account of your changing your name?” he assured him, that before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his guardian’s opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him when they got home.
But when they did get home, Von Blaise’s letter was nowhere to be found—it wasn’t in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college note-books, nor even among the wastepaper—in fact, there was nothing of the kind.
“But what a donkey I am to bother about it!” cried Siebenkæs, “what do I require it for, at all?”
Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers, suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted tone of voice, “Come out, old boy, and let’s have a run in the fields.” When they got there, he put into his hands the ‘Schaffhausen News,’ the ‘Swabian Mercury,’ the ‘Stuttgart Times,’ and the ‘Erlangen Gazette,’ and said, “These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of scoundrel you have for a guardian.”
In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:—
“Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian; which failing, that, as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts, that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall be taken pro mortuo), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th August, 1785.
“Inheritance Office of the free Imperial Borough of Kuhschnappel.”
It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its concluding lines, his soul’s brother took hold of his hand, and cried, “Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names with you.”
“You?—oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that letter,” he said, and they made another search all over the house, in every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant, nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe. However, there was nothing in this letter, except Siebenkæs’s name in Siebenkæs’s own writing—not another word, outside or inside. Quite natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other people’s as well, with flourishes about them.
The letter had once been written in the inside, but, to save an incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes from the paper of itself, and leaves it, in integrum, white as it was before it was written on.
I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court—grind the scrapings finer still on a piece of marble—moisten this fine cloth dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were, through the blackness of the ink.
But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time to the sun.
Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink with the sympathetic ink (likewise possessing the property of turning pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal persons; the latter however, has a red tint. A treaty of peace of three years’ standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of life, because the red ink—the encaustum, with which formerly no one but the Roman emperors might write—is too apt to turn pale, unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and etched into the territory afresh with good instruments—the so-called “instruments of peace”—at the point of the bayonet.
The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however. They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them, because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins of Sabbath breaking, such as working on their own account, at sewing, mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have their rehearsals on that day.
However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church’s vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit’s-blue poisonous flowers, which grow pyramidally to man’s height.[[14]] People like Von Blaise, not only ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take possession of the hills, and particularly the gallows-hills. The Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam’s dragon kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of Olives, be sure that he’s going to build an oil mill on it; and if he weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he’s either going a-fishing in it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the object of luring to him the ignes-fatui of sins; he kneels, but only as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously together, but does it as the machines called “maidens” did, only to cut people to pieces.
At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o’clock on the Sunday evening they walked, sans façon, into Von Blaise’s house. Everything was still and empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on which were Miller’s ‘Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,’ and Schlichthoher’s ‘Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.’ They pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude of prayer till 10 o’clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill “Amen,” and he would put something on to his bald head again.
This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake the city’s father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names. He likewise called him his “kind cousin and guardian.” Leibgeber, more angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the wrong had not been done to him, fired into the Heimlicher’s ears, from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the inquiries, “Which of us two is it that your worship has given out pro mortuo, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the ghosts of two of us here both together.” Blaise turned with a lofty air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, “If you have not changed your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe you are the gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several previous occasions. Or was it you, sir?” he said to Leibgeber, who shook like one possessed. “Well,” he continued in a more pleasant tone, “I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed, until now, that you were the person who left this for the university ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which, præter propter, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a mole beside his ear.”
“The infernal mole,” interrupted Leibgeber, “was obliterated by means of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass’s ear, and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a relative along with it.”
“That may be,” said the guardian coldly, “You must prove to me, Herr Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance), and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property out of my hands. What would you do—they very properly said—what answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[[15]]—it would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer, know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not as a man, but as a guardian—it would probably be the best course to let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr. Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible” (he ended more smilingly, and laying his hand on the other’s shoulder) “to see that which I hope may prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber, properly established by legal proof.”
“Then,” said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face, “is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to—to himself, that is to say, to your worship’s ward, to be taken as proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case of comparatio literarum would prove?”
“Oh, of course,” said Blasius, “something, certainly, but not everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now, you should be my cousin yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!”
Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice, “So I am, my dearest guardian—it was all done to try you—I hope you will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification.”
“All very well,” answered Blasius, more inflatedly, “but your own changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal investigation.”
This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by the hand, as much as to say, “Pray be patient,” and inquired in a voice which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, “Did you never write to me when I was in Leipzig?”—“If you are my ward, I certainly did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in some other way.”
Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, “Have you no recollection at all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?”
“This is really quite ludicrous,” answered Blaise, “in that case there could be no question about the matter!”
Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and thundered out, “You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I’ll throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet—if you lift a finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say you never received any letter on the subject, do you?”
“I had rather say nothing,” whispered Blasius, “evidence given under coercion is valueless.”
Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber said to the dog, “Mordax! hooy, Sau.,” took the glass periwig from the head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it, and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), “Screw him down yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want to say one or two pretty things to him—don’t let him say ‘Pap!’—Herr Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the kind—for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a human being’s.[[16]] The epithets which I here make use of, such as scoundrel—Judas—gallows-bird” (at each word he struck the glass turban like a cymbal against his other hand), “skunk, leech, horse-leech—nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not constitute libel, firstly because, according to ‘L. § de injur.,’ the grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here—and we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own rights—see ‘Leyser.’[[17]] Indeed, according to Quistorp’s ‘Penal Code,’ we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without animus injurandi, provided that he has not been already tried and punished for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished, you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the Heimlicher in Freyburg[[18]]—rather a different sort of man to you, it’s to be hoped—and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can lay hold of you—but I’ve got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!” The dog looked up at this word of command.
“Let him go, now,” Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate sinner.
“In a moment; but don’t you put me in a fury, please,” said Leibgeber, letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his scissors and black paper, “I want to be quite calm while I clip out a likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a gage d’amour. I want to carry this ecce homunculus about with me half over the world, and say to everybody, ‘Hit it, bang away at it well; blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I had not been far too strong.’
“I shan’t be able,” he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a good portrait, “to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as good friends as ever again.”
Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder—whom he had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his finger—as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last occasion of his being in Blaise’s grand drawing-room (where he displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he had brought with him a camel’s-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel’s-hair pencil and this ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest to the stove, or Themis.
“The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.
“Themis.”
Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley’s green composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a sudden shoot lustily forth.
So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it mightn’t be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.
When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, “Don’t pull such a long face about it—I shall keep flying backwards and forwards to you, of course. Come through the gate with me—I must get across the frontier of this country; let’s run, and get on to royal territory before six minutes are over our heads.”
When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits, seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness. The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends’ hearts. Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, “God be thanked! this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting.”
“If it only hadn’t all been on my account, old Henry,” said Siebenkæs, “your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner.”
“Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people’s faces as I am,” said Leibgeber, “you would have been in a greater rage if you had been in my place. One can bear injustice to one’s self—particularly when one has as good a temper as I have—but not to a friend. And unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger—or rather when I have got on to his back—I always spur the brute nearly to death, till he falls down, so that I mayn’t have to mount him again for the next three months. However, I have poured you out a nice basin of black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand.” Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him, “My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall bring my action to-morrow.”
They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came to a column which had been erected by the Princess of —— on the spot where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite significance to-night, Leibgeber said, “Now, right about face—march! Your wife is getting anxious—it’s past eleven o’clock. There, you see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress, the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my crop—other people’s faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool’s face into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are pretty well out of date. By the by.” he added, hastily, “promise me on your word of honour to do me one little favour.”
Siebenkæs instantly did so. “Don’t send my deposit after me[[19]]—a plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man,” he blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable. When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his head low towards the ground, and—loosened his garters.
“Couldn’t you have done that up here?” cried Siebenkæs, and went down to him, and said, “We’ll go as far as the gallows hill together.” The sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons and spices. As the first parting had caused their eyes to overflow, they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.
“Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?” said Siebenkæs. “If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the master of the house, as the superstition runs,” said Leibgeber, “I shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[[20]] of beasts is all alive and kicking.” At last they stopped at the market house, beside the place of execution. “Just up to the top,” said Siebenkæs, “no further.”
When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy life—and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought, in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning tears which women who had killed their children[[21]] (and were themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of blood—and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over all its streams—he took his friend’s hand, and, looking to the free starry heaven, said, “The mists of our life on earth must be resolved into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into suns. Henry, don’t you yet believe in the soul’s immortality?”—“It will not do yet, I can not,” Leibgeber replied. “Blasius, now, hardly deserves to live once, let alone twice or several times. I sometimes can’t help feeling as if a little piece of the other world had been painted on to this, just to finish it off and make it complete, as I’ve sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed. Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at last.”
His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, “We do not go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is no parting. By my soul! we do not go out. Farewell, farewell.”
And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye, that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest on his wife’s untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him—and of his friend’s night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for his friend that his tears flowed fast.
Oh ye two friends—thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me—the same which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.
So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs. We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.
These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of university life, at once saw straight through each other’s breasts into each other’s hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber’s firmness and power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own. On which account the poor’s advocate used to tell him, ten times over, the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.
The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander, suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, “The speechless heart has spoken.”
The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his ‘Messiah’ to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock’s) name. To which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give them three readings apiece from his ‘Messiah,’ rewarding each with a gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look to see Leibgeber’s foaming and stamping at a person’s thus worshipping himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.
What Leibgeber, on the other hand,—more like the Morlacks, who, as Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar—chiefly delighted in and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism which scorned this world’s absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.
GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.
I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian towns which takes its seat on Swabia’s town-bench of thirty-one towns. Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household goddess; and according to whose “election of grace” it is that poor sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed, imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were stolen silver plate with the owner’s name still unobliterated—or as though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.
The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners, subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.
To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came from the tap nearer the top proved sour. However, it is impossible for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too prevalent error respecting large towns.
The Behemoths and Condors among towns—Petersburg, London, Vienna—might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it ejects (its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears the country in the first place of villages, and next of country towns—which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of capital cities—inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long, constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs. Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a town like a lump of rubble,—or converted into a stave of the great tun of Heidelberg in this manner—any country people that might be still to the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming reefs or atolls of a town.
When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt, been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile of all classes, at heart, to equality—have next to be attacked and, if possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however—could we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable opponents of equality—the peasants, and the people of the smaller towns—should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be extinct—ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it was merely a plebeian one. There would be an absolute equality if pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession of one patent of nobility, and of real authentic ancestors. In Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times) without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing would be as it was in somewhat later times than those just alluded to, all capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher nobility are.
It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants; what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings, and supplies of, alone and unassisted—to say nothing of Scotland and Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced, starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in precipitating the citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true, grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered, in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and levyings of contributions—(which none but plebeian authors term “flaying” and “pulling the hide over the ears”),—and, the bark being off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions of men “cash down,” on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people, can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the clever manner in which many German states have, by energetic treatment, determined their population, as morbid matter, in a downward direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down to the United States of America, which are situated straight below them.
Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of other towns. I admit, as Nicolai’s assertion, that of the 60,000 which Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome—in the West Indies there were of course—more slaves than free men, for which reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble landlords, although the latter ought, one would think, to be in the majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with, many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace—in the tax she levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but that of home growth, to exclude thought and other (in an ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort—and even in her “green market,” or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, “Nobody at home.” (Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel continues to maintain its title of imperial market town, like a secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does, which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther threw at the devil.)
CHAPTER III.
LENETTE’S HONEYMOON—BOOK BREWING—SCHULRATH STIEFEL—MR. EVERARD—A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR—THE RED COW—ST. MICHAEL’S FAIR—THE BEGGARS’ OPERA—DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE MANNIKIN OF FASHION—AUTUMN JOYS—A NEW LABYRINTH.
The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black shoe-buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his happiness and his capital.