The Genuine Criminal Prosecutor.--My Magistracy.--A Birthday
and a Smuggling of Grain.
When, on the following Thursday, I set out to visit my Gustavus and
instruct him a little, behold Herr von Oefel, for a reason which it
will take a whole section to unfold preliminarily and profoundly, has
despatched him with a body of Hussars to the borders, where they were
to form a frumentary cordon, which should let no grain go out and no
pepper come in. Since most popular movements take their rise in
_peristaltic_ ones [those of the stomach], many people of fine sense
would have it they nosed out that the sovereign did the thing in order
that his subjects might have the means of living.
But I was brought at last into the greatest scrape with it all, and one
shall now hear how the matter was, but it must be from the very
beginning.
Namely, thus: the great Manor of Maussenbach has, as it is well known,
the supreme jurisdiction, although I and Mr. Commercial Agent von Roeper
are vexed at it, on opposite grounds. I am vexed because I see the
life, at least the honor, of some hundreds of people in the hands, not
of a whole Roman people, but of a single official, etc.; the
hereditary, feudal and juridical lord is vexed, because the criminal
court brings in nothing, since it costs more to have the executioners
sword sharpened than all comes to which is mowed down by it into the
treasury. "Adultery is the only thing left for the criminal
magistracy!" says the hereditary lord. Quite the opposite said his
justice, Kolb; high criminal trials were his high opera, penal acts
were his Klopstock's odes, and a constable his Orestes and Sancho
Panza. He would have divided the people into two classes, the hanging
and the hanged, and he would have remained criminal prosecutor. An
unshaven malefactor in prison was to him a Chinese goldfish in a glass
bowl, both were shown to guests. Free hunt after scoundrels only in two
or three quarters of the globe would have been his business and
pleasure. He hated me to death, because I had defended a man against
him and saved him from death and got him into the penitentiary. He
possessed the necrology of all who had been executed and a
matriculation or genealogical register of all robbers (except robbers
of honor) who stood ripe for reaping, and genuine knaves were for him
what well-disposed men were for the biographic Plutarch. In brief, he
was a genuine criminal prosecutor, just as the old German or modern
English laws would have him; for according to both every man must be
judged and sentenced only by his peers; but Kolb every knave and
murderer could claim to be as great a one as himself, and consequently
the culprit could say that he enjoyed the legal benefit of being tried
by one of his peers. I know not many contemporary criminal counsellors
and members of faculties to whom this could be applied.
This annoyed Roeper exceedingly, for his criminal counsellor brought
upon him every month a case that involved enormous expenses; and high
criminal judges are not so well served by the securing of criminals as
by keeping up the succession. In short, when the magistrate thought to
undertake a new levy of gallows recruits in the woods of Maussenbach,
for which _perhaps_ Robisch was to blame, Herr von Roeper would nullify
these thief-pressgangs by offering as many insults to his criminal
counsellor as were necessary to bring it about that the magistrate
could do no less than resign.
He did, to be sure, one thing more, the rascal, he drew a picture of my
littleness. As he could not forget my defensive argument, he acted the
fiscal attorney, and told Roeper I was good for nothing. I was a
man who hated him and sundry other noblemen, and who had the finest
court-style; Paul took every case of subjects against their liege-lord,
and had once even plied his quill against his honor the Commercial
Agent. Thou wretch of a Kolb! Why should not One-legs do that? My most
important cases are to this very day no other. And why should not, in
fact, a proposition be realized which I will forthwith make? This,
namely, that, after the pattern of the poor man's attorney, there
should be instituted people's attorneys, who should contend merely
against patrimonial tribunals, as the Knights of Malta do against
infidel ones.
I have it from Roeper's own mouth; for, in short, he installed me, to be
sure, as Maussenbach--magistrate, let the advocating and reading world
be as much astonished as it will. The Kolbian attacks were my very
spiral stairway to this judicial bench. My judicial principal must
needs, in his eternal battles with all instances and noble folk, have a
juristic _Taureador_ vigorous pen-harpooner; but Kolb said I was one.
Secondly, Herr von Roeper presented me the bench of justice, because I
neither rode (on account of my short leg) nor drove (on account of my
sea-sick stomach), and consequently would go on foot to the
administration of justice without the bevy of horses which his stable
otherwise must furnish as perquisites. For reviewers and their editors
the hint will do no harm, that they would be pleased to consider and
from this time take paper and review a man who is not, like themselves,
nothing; but one who sits in judgment as well as they, but over a more
real life than the literary, and who can even hang such reviewers, if
within his jurisdiction they steal anything but reputation.
Now comes the main thing. I was for the first time, as judge, in
Maussenbach and entered upon the duties of my office. All went very
well; I and my subjects were presented to each other, and I had on this
day over five hundred hands in mine. Of course I had still to smooth
down many an ugly face, which they made at me, because they had been in
the habit of making it at my little-loved principal; for people and
nobles, not merely in Rome, but also in our villages now-a-days, are
always in each other's hair and fighting like cats and dogs about
financial matters. Beside my magistracy, something else celebrated a
birthday to-day--the patron himself, Roeper; we feasted, therefore,
right well in honor of two things; first, because the parliament which
he had dissolved was in me to-day convoked again; and secondly, because
the summoner had, many years before, been born. I can say, I had a good
time of it, despite my unlikeness to the new born one--of thee I am not
at all speaking, Louisa and judicial Patroness!--what lame heart would
not beat in sympathetic harmony with thine, when it saw thy eye glisten
at the pleasure of thy husband and with wishes for his welfare? But it
is of thy wedded lord himself I speak: let him be, now, what he will,
it is impossible for me, in regard to a man with whom I sit under the
same keeping-room ceiling, to think the evil which I have hitherto
heard or even believed of him, and it is really not the same thing,
whether a highway or only a table is between us. If thou hatest a man
from hearsay; then go into his house and see whether, when thou hast
discovered in his conversation so many friendly traits, in his behavior
toward the child or the wife whom he loves so many signs of affection,
whether, then, thou goest out again with the hatred which thou
broughtest in. If the present author was ever in his life prepossessed
against anything, it was against the great; but since, in his musical
lessons at Scheerau, he has the opportunity of standing under the same
ceiling with many a great one, since he has himself skipped round among
these giants; he sees that a minister who oppresses his people may love
his children, and that the misanthrope at the session-table may be a
philanthropist at the sewing-table of his wife. Thus the Alpine peaks
have in the distance a bold and steep aspect, but near to, room enough
and good plants.
I confess, therefore, when according to ancestral usage (on birthdays
at court I never tasted the like) a tart or turnover was brought on, on
which the Vivat and the name Roeper could be read and eaten set in types
of almonds--when, furthermore, the proprietor of the name said indeed:
"this now is one of thy stupid tricks," but immediately had his eye
fill with moisture and added: "cut out a piece for our people also
outside," I confess, I say, I could at that moment have wished my
memory rid of many a saying I had heard of him which did not well
comport with the lapidary almond style, and I would especially have
given something, the crabs most readily, if he had not been so troubled
about the bits of gravel in their heads, and scolded so at his Louisa,
who in her joy had scattered in sundry contributions to his crab
_dactyliotheca_ or collection of pebbles. I will just be candid, the
deuce might have taken me, if I could have borne to remain hard as a
crab-eye, when thou, my music-pupil, beloved Beata, who from the
court-air[59] as other flowers do from the mephitic, hadst imbibed
nothing but tenderer charms and a higher enamel--when thou, fair pupil,
with a feminine sense of paternal respectability, didst go up to thy
father and with thy lips on his hand, offer him the most sincere
wishes, and when only on the neck of thy mother, who showered upon you
both looks of love, thou didst let thy heart overflow into a more
congenial one....
I come now to the promised _main thing_--namely, my Gustavus. I wish he
had stayed away. He rode in advance of two Hussars, who were escorting
a grain-wagon. The wagon was going to discharge its load beyond the
limits--(the principality of Scheerau, like the human understanding,
everywhere runs against limits)--the two Hussars were ready to be
bribed, so far all was agreeable; but Gustavus was not; the conductor,
the farmer, had given out that the smuggled goods were Roeper's
property--and from Roeper the whole of Gustavus recoiled from his very
fathers loins. Secondly, he was living now in bridal relations with
virtue, and in the honeymoon, when one regards good works and moral
_hors d'[oe]uvre_ [works of supererogation] as one and the same thing,
and when style and virtue alike have too much fire. In short, farmer
and wagon must go back; and the Cadet had burst into the birthday
chamber to make the announcement with over-boiling indignation against
Roeperish treacheries. But was he in a fit frame to do this when he saw
me again after many weeks and my fair scholar for the first time, and
when he found himself among the faces glowing with friendship, from
which he would at once banish blood and joy? The most he could do was
to draw me aside and disclose to me all; but the overhearing
neighborhood and the impetuous _corpus delicti_ discovered the same to
the Commercial Agent. Without ceremony he broke out into a furious
tirade against the Cadet, who, as he said, had nothing to do with the
matter, and continued rising to a climax in his fury, till a remedy
occurred to him for the whole disaster. I had to go out with him before
the street door and there he told me I could, as his magistrate, easily
see that one must needs give out the grain as the property of the
farmers, because the Prince would have no mercy on an official. This
last assertion I, as his new magistrate, could well understand, that
the covetous, arsenical king, who could tolerate office-trading,
judicial misdemeanors, and the like, would nevertheless come down like
a poisonous wind upon all disobedience to himself; but this I could not
see through, that a second treason must needs be the abattis and
advocate of the first. In the midst of our fight came running up at
length the object of it, the farmer himself, who broke in with
distorted visage and with the stammering entreaty that "His Grace would
not ungraciously remark the fact that he in his bewilderment had given
out _his_ grain as _His Grace's own_." Now the knot was untied; my
principal had until now merely confounded his own smuggled goods which
had been successfully brought over the frontier with arrested goods of
another party. To the farmer he forthwith, as a sound moralist,
represented the wickedness of deceiving at once himself, the country,
and the Prince, "and he wished he would break open now the writing of
the Government, he would deliver him up on the spot." He hastened in to
my Gustavus and hurled at him, with the heat of misunderstood
innocence, as many coarsenesses as one might expect from an offended
demi-millionaire, since gold possessors, like gold strings, sound the
harshest. I pitied my dear Gustavus with his plethora of virtue; he
pitied the ill-luck of the poor farmer, and Beata pitied our confusion
all round. With boiling emotions Gustavus fled out of a dumb apartment,
where he had broken off from the tenderest heart that ever trembled
under a fair form, that of Beata, the flowers of childish joy, and
dashed them to the ground.
In fact, now at length the old Harry was loose--namely, the howling of
Roeper's rage against the house of Falkenberg and its abominable
extravagance, and against the Cadet. Beata was silent; but not I. I
should have been a scoundrel (a greater one, I mean) if I had allowed
extravagance, in the sense in which the adversary meant it, to be
imputed to the Captain. I should, moreover, have been stupid (or
stupider) if I had not in my first official act endeavored to accustom
him to opposition, instead of waiting till the tenth or twentieth....
But the oil which I poured round for the purpose of smoothing his
waves, dropped into fire instead of water. Little did it help either of
us, that my pupil played upon us with the richest passages out of
Benda's Romeo, the old hilarity was not to be brought back again; we
twitched and twisted our faces to no purpose. Roeper looked like an
Indian cock and I like a European. I had intended, toward evening,
after moon-rise, to be somewhat sentimental in the presence of Beata,
seeing, besides, that the Count tore her away from me. I am certain I
should have had sensibility and sentiment adequate to the occasion. I
should, under the shade of a tree, have taken out my heart and said,
_prenez_. Nay, I seemed even to-day to draw Beata much nearer to me
than usual, a thing in which one prospers with all maidens with whose
parents one has business associations. But all that was now gone to the
old Harry. I was compelled to make my exit cold and hard as a page of
the exchequer, and felt miserably. If the new magistrate was provoked,
who had thus been ushered into his new office in a cloud of vexation,
his principal was still more so, who had been escorted by a jar and
jangle into his new year. So I limped off and said to myself all the
way, "thus, then, and with such face and aspect art thou hieing home,
happy Paul, from thy Maussenbach judgeship, of which thou hast boasted
so much in thy former sections. Thou need'st not rise on my account, O
moon; I need not to-night thy powdered face. That single, confounded
grain-wagon! and the Prince! and the skin-flint, too! and even youthful
virtue! Would that ye all.... But had I only been as sensible and felt
as much in the very forenoon, and had I only, before dinner, shown
forth something of my heart, an auricle, a fibre.
"Heigh! Mr. Magistrate," cried my Wutz, coming to meet me; "here again!
Hast had fine cases of adultery, harlotry, riots, defamations?"
"Merely a few defamations," I replied.