Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
write.
The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
Dog-post-days.
It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
"_To his Well-Born_,
_Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
_on_
_Free_. _St. John's_."
This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
modesty _can_ forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
the--Dog. JEAN PAUL."
I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
History to the learned world or not.
But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
_aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because
Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
sometimes so happy?
For this reason: because he is sometimes a _littérateur_. As often as
Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the