An Imperfect Character, such as are for sale to Romance-writers at
the Publishing Office of the Gazette.
"In Romance, as in the world, there are no perfectly good characters;
but neither, on the other hand, will either readers or his fellow men
be pleased with one who is out and out a knave--he must be merely half
or three-quarters of one, as it is with everything in the great world,
whether honor or vulgarity or truth or falsehood.
"In the publishing office of this paper there is a half-knave who is
offered for sale to any romance-writer in Scheerau, for the little
which they can afford to pay for him. I assure Messieurs the writers,
that I do not at all exaggerate the imperfections of this knave, for
the sake of disposing of him at a higher price; the owner will take the
knave back again if he proves not to have malice enough.
"This imperfect character was reared in the states of the Church and
born on the borders of Lower Italy; and after his baptism and majority
bought himself hatchels and mouse-traps. The fewest possible Germans
know that the Italians, with whom this branch of business flourishes,
can overreach us immensely. Our character soon raised himself
from hatchel-commissioner to hatchel-associe; he disposed of the
mouse-traps, which he ordered from Italy, in Germany, and the
mouse-holes were his Ophir and the flax-fields his mint-towns. The
hatchels which he sold before the purchase of his patent of nobility,
he knocked off at five and a half guilders.
"He must, even before his birth, have, in the other world, dealt in a
great house; for he brought with him a ready-made mercantile soul. It
was stupid in me not to have mentioned sooner: when, as a boy of nine
years old, he had the small-pox, he opened a little shop, and traded in
the pock matter, which people took from his dispensary, that is from
his body, for purposes of vaccination. He never gave out any matter
gratis, but demanded his money for it, and said he was a pock-seedman,
only a young beginner. This trade with his own manufacture, nature and
the Doctor soon suppressed, and the latter said he was as dear as an
apothecary. Hence he even undertook to be one himself.
"And he did become one, only according to the Mecklenburg idiom; for in
that every furnishing store is called an apothecary's shop.[42] That is
to say, in Unter-Scheerau he changed his religion and his business and
built himself a shop which was to buyers a mere hatchel and mouse-trap.
Here he kept for himself a shop-boy, a man-cook, a friseur, a barber,
and a reader of morning papers. All these persons were personated by
one, is own, this was and did all, as _ensophos_ [or Jack of all
trades.]
"Since with our knave, as an imperfect character, virtues must be
mineralized into faults--otherwise I would not offer him to any romance
builder--therefore let no one take it ill of me that I also bring
forward his white side to set by his black one, as on Bohemian tables
they always place side by side white and black dishes.
"In those days he always went forth from his shop on Sunday, though
with all permissible parsimony, still well-dressed. His hat, his
ring-finger, and his vest, were bordered with genuine gold; his stomach
and his calves were enclosed by the work of the silk-worm, and his back
was covered by the produce of the English sheep. It is quite in keeping
with human malice to call that extravagance which was in this case a
rare and covert beneficence; all that the imperfect character had on
consisted of pawns; for in order to cure people of pawning, he
threatened every one that he would wear every article on which he lent
money, as long as it remained in his hands. In this way he weaned many
a one, and the clothes of those with whom humane warnings availed
nothing he actually put on after dinner on Sunday. It was therefore
less from a want of taste than from an absence of avarice and hardness,
that just as he bore in his own person several menial personalities
united, so also he wore several dresses, and came forth as variegated
as a rainbow, or as a clothes-moth, that eats its way through from
cloth to cloth.
"As I am so perfectly sure that he was not spoiled by prodigality,
however much he may have the appearance, I will remove all such
appearance by the statement that he every Saturday bought his pound of
flesh for his bachelor's hall, but--for otherwise it would still prove
nothing--did not eat it. He did, indeed, eat one and with the spoon;
but it was that of the previous Saturday. That is to say, the imperfect
character fetched every Saturday his holy meat from the stall and
ennobled and decorated therewith his Sunday greens. But he appropriated
nothing to himself except the vegetable part. On Monday he had the
animal portion still and seasoned with it a second dish of greens. On
Tuesday the cooked-over flesh worked with new fire at the culture of a
fresh cabbage. On Wednesday it had to ogle before him with faint
fat-eyes [or spots of grease] floating on another cabbage-soup--and so
it went on, till at last the Sunday appeared when the soaked-out rag of
flesh came itself to the dinner, but in another sense, and Roeper
actually ate the pound. So, too, with a pound of Leibnitz's,
Rousseau's, Jacobi's,[43] thoughts one may boil vigorously whole
ship-kettle-fulls of original leaf-work.
"This parsimony the imperfect character alloyed still more with some
degree of deception. He interpolated the articles which he had received
in good condition, and wrote back he had received them in a bad
condition, they were so and so, and he could only allow for them half
price. A third of the price he thus by a clever enough legerdemain
whisked out of the buyer's distant pocket. Wares, casks, bags, which
had in his house only a relay-station and were to travel on farther,
paid out to him a transit-toll through a little hole he made in them,
by way of paying himself therefrom the little which might be charged to
the carrier if it was missed. He got up a mint-cabinet or hospital for
poor amputated invalid gold pieces. To other depreciated coins he gave
back the honorable name which they had lost, and compelled his factors
to accept them as legitimated and rehabilitated. No matter in how bad a
condition a gold piece might have come into his house, he treated it as
an officer and never dismissed it without promotion. Thus do such
nobler souls cover even the faults of money with the mantle of Charity.
"In this way his commercial stock and real estate enlarged more and
more, and in his heart, brooded over by the friendly warmth of the
public, there stirred, like an infusorium in its egg, a faint,
featherless, transparent thing, which he called Honor. The imperfect
character appropriated to himself, therefore, the character of
commercial counsellor.
"And now, when he had caught honor fairly by the wing and fixed it upon
paper, he could more readily offend against it than before, when he had
it not yet among his papers. He accordingly made his declaration of
love to the richest and most avaricious father of a beautiful daughter,
whose love for another--an officer--had already led her to take the
last step. The daughter hated his declaration of love; but the
character with the aid of the father, possessed himself of her
struggling hand, drew her by it to the altar, screwed on the ring, and
impaled her hand in his. Her second child was his first.[44]
"Meanwhile as his honor, after these bleedings and voidings, could not
well be kept on its feet, he had to be thinking about hanging on its
neck a good, strengthening amulet, Loyola's-metallic-plate, a
manifesto-of-Luke-and-Agatha--a _diploma of nobility_. His honor was
happily restored to health by the Imperial Chancery of Vienna.
"As he had no _community of goods_ with his wife, but only with his
creditors, he released himself from the mercantile profession by an
innocent failure and found a refuge for himself and his clear
conscience and his wife's goods and his own at his country seat, in
order there to serve his God.
"I mean his Gods;--friends, the imperfect character had none. His ideas
of friendship were too noble and lofty, and demanded the purest and
most disinterested love and devotion on a friend's part; hence he was
disgusted with the low blockheads around him, who desired not his heart
but his purse, and who pressed him to their bosoms merely that they
might squeeze something out of him. He could not so much as bear to
have such selfishness in his presence, and his house, therefore, like
the human windpipe and Sparta, could not bear to have in it any foreign
thing. He believed with Montaigne, that no one could properly love more
than one friend, as well as one mistress; hence he bestowed his heart
upon a single person, whom of all he prized most highly--namely his
own--this he had tried and proved; its disinterested love for him it
was that enabled him to attain Cicero's ideal, who wrote, that one
could do for a friend anything, even base things, which one would not
do for himself.
"He is the greatest stoic in all the territory of Scheerau; he not
merely says that all pleasures are vanity, but he even despises all
temporal good, because it cannot make him happy. This contempt of such
is not indeed to be supposed inconsistent with the most earnest
striving after it, because a philosophor, as the stoics in the note[45]
say, will prefer a life in whose furniture there is so much left as a
wire-brush or a stable-broom, to one in which merely this little were
wanting, although he is not made any the happier thereby. Hence the
imperfect character sets as much store by the least effects (as old
Shandy did by the least truths) as by the greatest; accordingly he must
make his fire of nut-shells, seal his letters with wax torn off from
old ones, write his own letters on the blank spaces in those of his
correspondents, etc. The Imperfect Character has herein a resemblance
to the miser, who makes a profit out of similar trifles, and whom no
reasons can refute; for if I may not throw away a penny, I may not a
farthing, half a farthing, 1000th of a farthing; the reasons are the
same.
"There is in man a terrible tendency to avarice. The greatest prodigal
might be made something still worse, the greatest niggard, if one
should give him so much as to make him account it much and worth
increasing; and so _vice versa_. So the dropsical craves more water the
more he is swollen with it; as his _water_ ebbs, his thirst ebbs with
it.
"The imperfect character thanks heaven for two things: first, that he
has fallen into no avarice, secondly, into no extravagance--that he
does not deny his wife or his child anything, gives them everything,
and only in the case of stupid people, who want to have means of
prodigality, takes such means out of their hands, as the old Germans,
the Arab and the Otaheitans steal from strangers only, but never from
inhabitants--that he is chaste and would sooner untie the money-purse
of a merchant than the girdle of Venus--that if he had as many pennies
as such or such a one, he would fly to the help of the poor in a very
different manner--but nevertheless he no more allows himself to be
robbed of his bit than the mourner does of his sorrow, and that at the
Last Day the question will be put to him, whether he has gained
interest on his pound (sterling).
"This vendible character in the publishing office is, like an English
malefactor, stock and seller at once, and will expect nothing of the
romance writer for his whole being except a copy gratis of the romance
into which he is thrown."
So far Fenk, who could bear all men, but no monster, no skinflint, I
have secured this imperfect character for my biography (for he himself
exists even biographically under the name of Roeper); besides there is a
remarkable deficiency here in genuine knaves; nay, if I should compare
even Roeper with the devils of the Epic Poets and myself with the Poets
themselves, neither of us would look very big.
If my readers had a letter of Dr. Fenk's, excusing his former
severity--which reminded us of Scheerau, of the Doctor and of a
person very dear to me, and which fits in exactly with the whole
narrative--they would insert this letter also in the biography. I have
that same letter and the same privilege, and splice it in here:
_Fenk to Me_.
"Accept the poor bearer of this as your client; the Maussenbacher has
screwed on to the poor devil his suction-works and quite exhausted him,
and now leaves him in the lurch. None of all the knaves and advocates
in Scheerau will serve him as patrons against a rich nobleman, for they
wish to get the latter one day as their own.
"I am myself, indeed, daily in Maussenbach, and pleading; but the
niggard accepts no disinterested arguments; and for all else Roeper has
feeling and reason. There will yet come a time when one will find it as
hard to comprehend our past stupidity, as we our future wisdom: I mean,
when one will be unable to tolerate, not merely, as now, any beggars,
but even any millionaires.
"Of the father of a beautiful daughter one constrains himself to think
well. I force myself to do so, too: in thy piano-pupil Beata, thou
sawest only the green leaves under the bud; now thou mightest see the
opening rose-leaves themselves and the fragrant nimbus around them.
Such a daughter of such a father! In other words: the rose blooms upon
a black web of root-fibres sucking in nourishment from a filthy soil.
"I am here for the purpose of curing her: the old man will have
something for his money; but in Maussenbach no one reflects on a saying
of the Abbe Galiani, who was buried four days before I left Italy, that
women are perpetual patients. Merely, however, in the nerves: the most
sensitive are the most sickly; the most rational or the coldest are the
healthiest. If I were a prince, I would make a princely resolution, and
in a rescript from my most illustrious hand would make it a case of
house-arrest, if a woman drank so much as a single spoonful of
medicine. You poor misguided creatures, why have you in general so much
confidence in us men, and us doctors in particular, as to be pleased
that we, tapping the glasses of physic one after another in the
medicine-chest, take you to drive in a medicine-carriage until we
transfer you to the carriage that bears you on your last journey?... So
have I said to them many a time, and each time they have only taken the
more willingly all the medicines I prescribed for them.
"The only kind of medicine that helps women more than it hurts them is
certainly dress. According to many naturalists the life of birds is
lengthened by moulting, and that of women, too, I add; for they are
always ailing until they have on a new plumage. This is not easy to
explain on therapeutic principles, but it is true; and the more
distinguished one is, consequently the more sickly, the oftener is he
obliged to moult, as the swamp-salamander also sheds his skin every
five days. A female crab, waiting for a new shell, cuts an awkward
figure in her hole. Every poison can become an antidote, and it is
certain that clothes can give sicknesses, _e. g_., hectic, plague,
etc.; so must they, under the direction of a sensible physician, be
able to remove sicknesses. An enlightened Medicus will, in my opinion,
if Halle's domestic dispensary, _i. e_., the wardrobe, fails to give
relief, take his recipes from no other dispensary than the Auerbach
cellar in Leipsic. As thou canst therewith fly to the help of many a
fair invalid, I will furnish thee out of my _materia medica_ the
following medicinal neckerchiefs, dresses, etc.
"For steel-medicines: steel-rosettes, and steel-chains.
"The precious stones which were formerly supplied from apothecaries'
shops are even now good to be used outwardly.
"Bouquets, provided they are of silk, are probated medical plants, and
by their perfume strengthen the brain.
"Shawls are healing to the breast, and (not a red thread, which is a
superstition, but) a necklace with a medallion is, according to modern
physicians, serviceable to diseased necks.
"With Peruvian bark much imposition has been practised, but the genuine
is a frock _a la Peruvienne_.
"As, according to the modern surgery, all wounds are healed by mere
covering, so, instead of the English taffeta plaster, mere taffeta on
the body renders the same service.
"A new visiting-fan is, in violent swoons, indispensable; but whether a
muff should be classed among emollient remedies, false _tours_ among
setons, and a parasol among cooling medicines, and dress-trimmings
under the head of trusses and bandages, this question one or three
hundred cases cannot yet settle.
"We prefer to insist upon this, that a frizzling comb is a
trepanning-instrument for headache, a repeating-watch for an
intermittent fever, and a ball-dress is a panacea.
"And so, therefore, to speak jocosely, the ladies' tailor is an
operator; his sew Lug-finger a _digitus medicus_;[46] his finger-hat
[as we Germans call the thimble] a doctor's hat....
"Why did I forget thee, noble Beata? No _parure_ can cure thee; and if
at some future day thy fair heart should grow sick, nothing would heal
it but the best heart or death....
"Wonder not at my fire. I have just come from her and forget all faults
of hers which a fortnight ago I still knew. Maidens, who are often
sick, accustom themselves to wear a look of patient resignation which
is _killingly beautiful_.[47] have underscored her favorite expression,
but only from her own tongue can it flow in the sweetest dying cadence.
To this patience she is trained not only by her everlasting headaches,
but also by her father, who equally torments and loves her, and who, to
do her a pleasure, would (according to the egotism of avarice) kill off
a world. If the _soul_ of many persons (surely hers also) is too
delicate and refined for this marshy earth, so, too, is the _frame_ of
many, which can stand nothing harsher than humming-bird weather and
vales of Tempe and Zephyrs. A tender body and a tender mind fret each
other. Beata, like all of that crystallization, inclines a little to
enthusiasm, sensibility, and poetry: but what sets her high up in my
eyes is a sense of honor, a modest self-respect, which (according to my
small experience) is an inheritance not of education, but of the
kindliest destiny. This dignity secures, without prudish anxiety,
female virtue. But if one must educate into the soul, nay preach into
it, this womanly _point d'honneur_, ah, how easily is such a sermon
overcome!
"Women, who respect themselves, are encompassed with so full a harmony
of all their movements, words, looks!... I cannot depict her; but such
ones are subjects to be depicted, who resemble the rose, which, down
below, where one does not pluck them, has the longest and hardest
thorns, but above, where one enjoys them, clothes itself only in a
panoply of soft and bending ones.
"I know not whether it is with thee an old story, that daughters tell
their mothers every truth and all secrets; to me it is something new,
and only one best daughter, Beata, can do it.
"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as
to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure,
and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great
tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended)
without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great
kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of
coarse natures, that cannot guess the hidden gratitude and the dumb
joy, they are forced to assume hypocritically not the feeling but the
expression of it. Beata's father demands for every present he makes,
whose value he weighs even to an apothecary's grain, an exultant and
exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till
some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of
fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad
days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice,
what I have often before, that woman's body and soul are too tender and
excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion,
and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of
household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by
their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver
wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from
vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul
of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in
the fifth act herself die with the hero.
"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true,
the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He
seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile,
and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except
pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all
his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister's lady,
that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has
Oefel's heart already _hooked_ or _eyed_ to her charms; but the devil
trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee,
whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou
wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in
the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly,
art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in
conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it;
for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could
please (_if he pleased_), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of
whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and
he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond
must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect
foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a
courtier, and buys with another's favor only his own. I will console
thee with still more 'it is true's' before I bring on my 'buts.' Beata,
it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I
not admire him? the minster's lady looks as if she were asking _her_
every minute, 'why dost thou not envy me, when my vassal is like myself
a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?'--for he keeps no one
position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow
from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his
body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the
remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a
hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning,
breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his
hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can
now properly introduce the promised But.
"But although my fair patient overlooks him so coldly, as one who is
trying on us a dress, he, however, assumes the opposite, and throws at
her fire-balls to illuminate himself, and aeolypiles or smoke-balls for
her obscuration, and is already, in advance, cutting mint-stamps for
his future medals of victory. Men or manikins like Oefel have such a
superfluity of truth, that they are obliged to give it not to one
alone, but to distribute it among a thousand women; Oefel would fain
command a whole female slave-ship; meanwhile he cares as little about
thee as about the minister's lady, who loves him, because it is her
latest lover, and whom he loves, first, because in her triumphal
chariot, to which formerly a number of ninnies were harnessed, he would
be glad to draw alone as thill-horse; and, secondly, she possesses more
art and less feeling than he, and persuades him that it is precisely
the reverse.
"That I may now weave our Beata, whom thou wouldst gladly get into thy
life and into thy book, into the life and the book of Oefel (he is upon
me also), for this reason, dear Paul, I have delivered so many
cabinet-sermons to old Roeper to the point that the sickliness of his
daughter is to be overcome not by one but by several hundred
physicians, _i. e_., by society--that the old man will give her a
society or rather will give her to one, without himself giving her the
necessary alimony. He wants to transplant her into some bed or other of
the court-garden: 'She, too, shall, with the rest, gain knowledge of
the world,' he says, and has none himself. He would, if he could, drag
and crush down the whole female world from its altars and pedestals and
presidential chairs and regular seats to milking-stools and work-benches
and foot-stools; nevertheless his own daughter shall have Jews and
diamond-dust grind facettes and angles of radiance upon her, which
he himself hates. Once at court, the legation-counsellor will see her
every day--and Jean Paul is _nowhere_.
"This Jean Paul asked me in a sly way, whether he might not act as
lawyer to the father of the aforesaid daughter, because he, said Jean,
had heard of the resignation of the present one. Herr Kolb, however
(the lawyer in question), is still there, and still quarrelling; says
every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Roeper's that I know;'
while Roeper says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Kolb's
that I know;' and so the two are glued together by mutual
apprehensions. Besides, just now, the thing is not to be thought of;
for in fourteen days old Roeper receives the oath of allegiance from his
manor. A miser dreads to change or to risk anything.
"Why dost thou let thy good sister stay so long in the arsenical fumes
of the court? Is what she can gain there worth as much as what she
brings with her and may lose there, her pure, tender, though volatile
heart? On my tours I thought otherwise, but now in solitude, a
coquettish insect, a coquet-crab, creeping now forward and now
backward, that keeps opening her great and little shears and always
reproduces them as fast as one tear's them off, who instead of a heart
carries in her breast a stomach, and yet, like all insects, is
cold-blooded, such an incrusted female crab is more revolting to me
than a shelless one in the moulting period of sensibility, which is too
soft, and out of which romance-writers make the delicate crab-butter.
Sensibility improves with years, coquetry grows worse with years. Why
dost thou not take thy Philippina home? To these questions Jean Paul
has vouchsafed no answer; but to his I have; for I do not take
vengeance; I could wish rather the said Paul were pressing Beata's
fingers to-day on wrong fingers rather than on the right keys, and that
now in the spring-time of her years she looked round beseechingly
beside the piano toward Paulus and illumined him with the heaven of her
broad blue eyes; the poor devil, even this Paul, would no longer know
himself, and would say: Without a beautiful eye, for all other beauty I
would not give a doit, much less myself; but for a pair of heavenly
eyes I forget all contiguous charms and all contiguous faults, and all
Bach and Benda, what they are, and my mordants and the false fifths and
much more. Farewell, forgetful one! Dr. Fenk."
We understand each other, hearty friend! whoever has once written
satires himself can forgive all satires upon himself, especially the
most malicious, only not dull ones. But, though the doctor has carried
on the fight in jest, still I must inform such readers as reside at a
distance from Scheerau, without reference to myself, that the aforesaid
Legation-counsellor, Oefel, is the most insignificant fellow that
either of us has ever known; is one who is only less embarrassed among
women, but always so among men, and in a small circle far more than in
a large one, not to say that he is always seeking and hunting after
that attention which modest people carefully shun, namely, general
attention. If he succeeds in getting this elsewhere, he shall not have
it in my book.... The following case is, to be sure, impossible,
especially on account of the cursed long- and short-legged or
_trochaic_ supports and consoles on which my torso rests; but still a
man can picture to himself the impossible case, which is this, that I
should one day appear before my Beata with a declaration of love, and
so, contrary to my own expectation, be myself the hero of this
biography and she the heroine. I am regularly dumfounded, for what I
would be really saying and supposing is that I became Roeper's lawyer,
and next thing, in fact, (for I should be every court-day "sweet," or a
_sweet creature_, as a woman expresses herself, who belongs more to the
_fair_ than to the _weaker_ sex) absolutely his son-in-law. With
pleasure would I, for the good and sympathetic reader's gratification,
describe all biographically.... But as has been said, the thing is,
unluckily, quite impossible, so far as I can see into the future; and
this merely by reason of a cursed unsymmetrical wire-pedestal, which,
to be sure, he whom his ill-fortune has fastened thereto would fain
make good by a thousand glazings and rasures, and on which Epictetus
likewise for a long time stood.
In the heat of my feelings I have been carried quite out of my
biographical plan; it was hitherto to have been cleverly kept from the
reading world (and the thing was successfully done) that none of all
these adventures are yet old, and that in a short time the life of
these persons will go on hand in hand simultaneously with my biography.
But now I have fired off all my powder. On the whole a new section
must, now be commenced, that shall contain more sense....