Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre
à Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.
In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.
Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.
In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
say rather, men who write much make fast writers.
And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read
Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge
myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
as often.
To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
three inches.
Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
_Stultis sat!_[119]
In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the
Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
for it all....
Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides
upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and
say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that
description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.
For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker
pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such
accidental touches, laugh at them _in naturâ_;[121]--he pledges
himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
_Scientiâ media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise
one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
his people off, but they always took it as a joke.
It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
_investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum
secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a
forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need.
And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
_gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely,
without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
the following