The following is certain: every owner of a very beautiful or very rich
daughter keeps, as it were, a Pitt under his roof, which to himself is
of no service, and which he must put to its first use after it has long
lain idle, by selling it to a _Regent_.[150] Strictly and commercially
speaking, daughters are not an article of trade; for the parental grand
adventurers no one can confound with those female dealers in second-hand
frippery, and stall-women, whose transit-business one does not love to
name; but a stock, with which one gains in a South Sea, or a clod,
wherewith one transfers symbolically (_scortatione_) real estate. "_Je
ne vends que mes paysages et donne les figures par dessus le
marche_,"[151] said Claude Lorraine, like a father,--and could easily
say it, because he had the figures painted in his landscapes by
_others_;--even so in the purchase or marriage-contract only the
knightly seats are supposed, and the bride who resides upon them is
thrown into the bargain. Even so, higher up, is a princess merely a
blooming twig, which a princely sponsor plucks off and carries home, not
for the sake of the _fruits_, but because a _bee-swarm_ of lands and
people has attached itself thereto.
If a father, like our Minister, has not much, then he can pawn his
children, as the Egyptians did their parents (namely, the mummies of
them), as mortgages and hand-pledges or imperial pawns, which are not
redeemed.
At present the mercantile order, which formerly dealt only in foreign
products, has got possession of this branch of commerce also; methinks,
however, they might find room enough in their lower vaults to be selfish
and damned, without going up stairs to the daughter. In Guinea only the
nobility can trade; with us they are cut off and debarred from almost
all trade, except the small trade in daughters, and the few other things
which grow on their own estates; hence is it that they hold so fast to
this liberty of trade, and that the noblesse seem here to be a Hanse
alliance for this delicate branch of business; so that one may, in some
manner, compare the high standing[152] of this class with the _higher_
one (in a literal sense) which marketable people in Rome were obliged to
mount[153] in order to be seen.
It is a common objection of young and (so-called) sensitive hearts, that
this sort of transaction very much constrains, or in fact crushes love;
whereas nothing perhaps makes so good a preparation for it as this very
thing. For when the bargain is once concluded and entered by the
bookkeeper (the parson) in the ledger, then does the time truly come on
when the daughter can consider and provide for her heart, namely, the
fair season after marriage, which is universally assumed in France and
Italy, and is gradually coming to be in Germany also, as the more
suitable time for a female heart to choose freely among the host of
men; her state then, like the Venetian, grows out of a commercial into a
conquering one. The husband himself, too, is quite as little interrupted
afterward as beforehand in his love by this short business transaction;
all is, that now--as in Nuremberg every Jew is followed by an old
woman--close upon the heels of our bridegroom a young one is seen. Nay,
often, the nuptial tradesman conceives an inclination even for the
article which he has carried home with him,--which is an uncommon piece
of good fortune; and as Moses Mendelssohn, with his bundle of silken
wares under his arm, thought out his _letters_ upon the _affections_, so
do better men, amidst their business, meditate love-letters on this
branch of trade, and deal with the virgin--as merchants in Messina[154]
do with the holy virgin--in Co.; but of course such profitable
connections of love with business must always be rare birds, and are
little to be counted upon.
The foregoing I wrote for parents who are fond of sporting with
children's happiness; I will now out of their and my sport make
something serious. I ask you, in the first place, about your right to
prescribe for morally free beings their inclinations, or even the show
of inclination, and by one act of despotism to stretch the poisonous
leaden sceptre over a whole free life. Your ten years more of
apprenticeship to life make as little distinction in the reciprocal
liberty as talent or its want. Why do you not as well enjoin upon your
daughters _friendship_ for life? Why do you not, in the second marriage,
exercise the same right? But you have even no right to reject, except in
the age of minority, when the child has not yet any right to choose. Or
do you demand, upon their leaving the paternal roof, as pay for
training them up to freedom, the sacrifice of this very freedom itself?
You act as if you had been educators, without having been yourselves
educated; whereas you are merely paying off to your children a heavy
inherited debt to your parents, which you can never pay back to _them_;
and I know but one unpaid creditor in this respect, the first man, and
but one insolvent debtor, the last. Or do you shield yourselves under
the barbarously immoral Roman prejudice, which offers children for sale
as white negroes of the parents, because the power allowed at an earlier
period over the non-moral being slips over, unobserved from the
gradualness of its development, into a power over the moral being?
If you may, out of love, force children to their happiness, so may they
afterward, quite as well out of gratitude force you to yours. But what
is, then, the happiness for which you are to throw away their whole
heart, with all its dreams? Chiefly _your own_; _your_ glory and
aggrandizement, _your_ feuds and friendships, are they to quench and buy
with the offering of their innermost souls. Dare you own aloud your
silent presuppositions in regard to the happiness of a forced marriage;
for example, the dispensableness of love in wedlock, the hope of a
death, the (perhaps) double infidelity, as well toward the connubial
merchant as toward the extra-connubial lover? You must presuppose them
sinners,[155] in order not to be yourselves robbers?
Tell me not that marriages of inclination often turn out ill, and forced
marriages often well enough, as may be seen in the instance of the
Moravians, the old Germans, and Orientals. Name me rather all barbaric
times and nations, in which--for both indeed only reckon the man, never
the wife--a happy marriage means nothing more than a happy husband. No
one stands by near enough to hear and to count a woman's sighs; the
unheard pang becomes at last speechless; new wounds weaken the bleeding
of the oldest. Further: the ill-luck of fancy-marriages is chargeable
upon your very opposition to them, and your war against the married
couple. Still further: every forced marriage is, in fact, for the most
part, half a marriage of fancy. Finally: the best marriages are in the
middling class, where the bond is more apt to be love; and the worst in
the higher, where it is more a mercenary motive; and as often as in
these classes a prince should choose merely with his heart, he would get
a heart, and never lose nor betray it.
Now, then, what sort of a hand is that into which you so often force the
fairest, finest, richest, but rebellious one? Commonly, a black, old,
withered, greedy fist. For decrepit, rich, or aspiring libertines have
too much of the connoisseur, too much satiety and freedom, to steal any
other than the most splendid creatures; the less perfect fall into the
hands and homes of mere lovers and amateurs. But how base is a man, who,
abandoned of his own character, backed merely by the despotic edict of a
stranger, paying for his fortune with a stolen one, can now drag away
the unprotected soul from the yearning eyes of a weeping love into a
long, cold life, and clasp her to his arms as against the edges of
frosty swords, and therein so near to his eye see her bleed and grow
pale and quiver! The man of honor even gives with a blush, but he takes
not with a blush; and the better lion, the beast, spares woman;[156]
but these soul-buyers extort from constrained beings at last even the
testimony of free-will.
Mother of the poor heart, which thou wilt bless by misfortune, hear me!
Suppose thy daughter should harden herself against the misery which is
forced upon her, hast thou not reduced her rich dream of life to empty
sleep, and taken out of it love's islands of the blest, and all that
bloomed thereon; the fair days when one roamed over them, and the
perpetual happy retrospect of them when they already lie with their
blooming peaks low in the horizon? Mother, if this happy time was ever
in thy breast, then snatch it not from thy daughter; and if it was
barbarously torn from thee, then think of thy bitter pang, and bequeath
it not!
Suppose, further, she makes the kidnapper of her soul happy, reckon now
what she might have been to its darling; and whether she does not then
deserve anything better than to gratify a jailer, locked in with her
forever by one shutting of the prison-door. But it seldom fares so well
as this; thou wilt heap a double disaster upon thy soul,--the long agony
of thy daughter, and the growing coldness of her husband, who by and by
comes to feel and resent refusals. Thou hast cast a shadow over the time
when man first needs the morning-sun,--namely, youth. O, sooner make all
other seasons of the day of life cloudy; they are all alike, the third
and the fourth and fifth decades; only at sunrise let it not rain into
life; only this one never returning, irredeemable time darken not!
But how, if thou shouldst be sacrificing not merely joys, relations, a
happy marriage, hopes, a whole posterity, to thy plans and commands,
but the very being herself[157] whom thou constrainest? Who can justify
thee, or dry thy tears, when thy best daughter,--for she is the very one
who will be most likely to obey, be dumb and die, as the monks of La
Trappe see their cloister burn down, without one of them breaking the
vow of silence,[158]--when she, I say, like a fruit half in the sun and
half in the shade, blooms outwardly, and inwardly grows cold and pale;
when she, dying after her lifeless heart, at last can no longer conceal
anything from thee, but for years bears round the paleness and the pangs
of decline in the very orient of life; and when thou canst not console
her, because thou hast crushed her, and thy conscience cannot suppress
the name of infanticide; and when at last the worn-out victim lies there
under thy tears, and the wrestling creature, so affrighted and so young,
so faint, and yet thirsting for life, forgiving and complaining, with
languishing and longing looks, with painfully confused and conflicting
emotions, sinks with her blooming limbs into the bottomless flood of
death,--O guilty mother on the shore, thou who hast pushed her in, who
will comfort thee? But I would call every guiltless one, and show her
the bitter dying, and ask her, Shall thy child also perish thus?