BOOK IV.

BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY.

* * *

RICHTER'S

FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES.

GEORGE BELL & SONS

LONDON: YORK ST., COVENT GARDEN

NEW YORK 66 FIFTH AVENUE, AND

BOMBAY: 53 ESPLANADE ROAD

CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON BELL & CO.

FLOWER, FRUIT AND THORN

PIECES;

OR, THE

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH, AND MARRIAGE

OF

FIRMIAN STANISLAUS SIEBENKÆS,

PARISH ADVOCATE

IN THE BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

(_A GENUINE THORN PIECE_.)

BY

JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.

Translated from the German

BY

ALEXANDER EWING.

LONDON

GEORGE BELL AND SONS

1897

[_Reprinted from Stereotype plates_.]

PREFACE

TO THE

SECOND EDITION.

What advantage shall I reap in giving to the world this, my new edition

of 'Siebenkæs,' embellished and perfected as it is with all the

additions, corrections, and improvements which it has been in my power

to make? Can I expect to be any the better for it? People will, I

daresay, buy it and read it; but not give much of their time to the

study of it, nor be sufficiently detailed and thorough in their

criticism of it. The Pythia of Criticism has hitherto been chary of her

oracles to me, as the Greek Pythia was to other inquirers; she has

chewed up my laurels, instead of crowning me with them, and prophesied

little or nothing. The author very distinctly remembers setting to

work, for instance, at the second edition of his 'Hesperus,'[1] with

his pruning-saw in his left hand and his oculist's knife in his right,

and applying both instruments to the work to an extraordinary extent;

it was in vain, however, that he looked for anything like an

appreciative notice of it, either in literary or non-literary

publications. Similarly, in all his new editions (those of 'Fixlein,'

the 'Preparatory School,' and 'Levana,' are proofs and witnesses[2]),

however he may set to work, hanging up new pictures, turning some of

the old ones' faces to the wall--marching off some ideas, relieving

them by others--making characters conduct themselves better, or worse,

or hit upon better, or upon worse, ideas, as the case may be,--the

deuce a reviewer takes the least notice of it, or says a word to the

world on the subject. But in this way I learn little, am not told where

I have done pretty well, or the reverse, and am _minus_, perhaps, some

little bit of praise and encouragement which I may deserve.

This is how the question stands, and several consequences follow as

matters of course; the indifferent class of readers consider the author

incapable of making any critical emendations, while the enthusiastic

class think none are necessary--their common point of agreement being

the supposition that he absorbs and emits the whole thing with the same

natural, matter of course, ease and absence of effort as the Aphides,

the plant-lice, do the honey-dew, which is in such request with the

bees, though, unlike the said bees, he is not very clever at making the

wax for it.

Then there are a good many who think every line should be left in the

condition in which it first flowed, or burst, spontaneously from its

author's fancy--just as if corrections were not themselves spontaneous

outbursts as well as the other. Other readers prefer to belong to none

of the above factions and consequently belong, to some extent, to all.

Were it my object to express myself briefly, I should merely have to do

so as follows:--firstly, they say, it would be much better if he simply

spoke artlessly out whatever he finds it in his heart to say! and (if

this is just what one happens to have done), secondly, how much better

would be the effect of that which he finds it in that heart of his to

say, and how much it would be improved, were it to be done according to

the canons of taste and criticism! I can express these ideas likewise

in a more roundabout form, as follows:--If a writer curbs himself too

closely, if he thinks less about the strong throb of his heart than

about the delicate arterial network and plexus of taste, and breaks up

its broad stream into fine, minute, dew-drops of the invisible

perspiration of criticism--then they say--"the fact is, that the

thicker and more powerful a jet of water is, the higher it shoots,

penetrating the atmosphere, and overcoming its resistance; whilst a

more delicate jet is dissipated before it gets half as far." But, when

the author does just the reverse of the above; when he presses out all

his overflowing heart in one gush, and lets the blood-billows flow when

and how they will, then the critics point the _following_ moral--doing

it, however, in a metaphor other than I should have expected of

them--"A work of art is like a paper kite, which rises the higher the

more the boy pulls and holds back the string, but falls the moment he

lets it go."

We return at last to our book. The most important of the emendations

made upon it are, perhaps, the historical; for, since the first edition

appeared, I have had the good fortune--partly because I have had an

opportunity of visiting and seeing Kuhschnappel itself, the scene of

the story (as was some time since stated in Jean Paul's letters),

partly from my correspondence with the hero of it himself--of becoming

acquainted with family circumstances and occurrences which, probably, I

could not have got at in any other way, unless I had sat down and

coolly invented them. I have even made prize of some fresh

Leibgeberiana, which I am happy to be able now to communicate to the

public.

The new edition is also improved by the banishment of all those

foreigners of words which occupied places more appropriately to be

filled by natives of the country; also by a critical cleansing away of

all the genitive final s's of compound words. But really the labour of

sweeping and striking out letters and words all through four long

volumes can be estimated so highly by nobody, not even by Posterity, as

by the sweeper and striker-out himself.

Another of the improvements made in the Second Edition is, that I have

placed both the "Flower-pieces" at the end of the second volume[3] (for

in the former edition they came both at the beginning of the first),

and that it is no longer the first volume, but, much more

appropriately, the second, which closes with the first Fruit-piece.

And lastly, it may, perhaps, be reckoned as one of the minor

improvements, that in the two Flower-pieces--particularly in that of

the Dead Christ--I have not _made_ any improvements, but left

everything as it was, and not attempted to scrape away any of the

golden writing-sand with which I had made the letters a little rough

and illegible.

The above are the principal alterations, concerning which I should be

so glad to be favoured with the opinions of able reviewers, to the

increasing of my information, perhaps also of my reputation. But, as

there could not be a more troublesome business than the comparing of

the old book with the improved one, page by page, as it were, I have

deposited in the school-book shop the printed copy of the old edition,

in which all the writing-ink emendations of the printing-ink, that is

to say, all the places which have been written or stroked through, can

be easily seen at a glance, often half and whole pages done to death,

so that it would really astonish you. Critics not on the spot must,

indeed, content themselves with laying the volumes of each of the

editions into the opposite scales of a grocer's balance, and then

looking, when they will see how much the new edition outweighs the old.

From my strict and anxious treatment of my Second Edition, then, all

critics may form an idea of my strict and anxious treatment of my

first; they may also form an idea how much I struck out of my

manuscript before printing, when they observe how much I have struck

out after printing.

Dr. Jean Paul Fr. Richter.

Bayreuth, _September_, 1817.

CONTENTS.

PREFACE to the Second Edition

PREFACE, with which I was obliged to put Jacob Oehrmann, General

Dealer, to sleep, because I wished to narrate the "Dog Post Days,"

and these present "Flower-Pieces," &c., &c., to his Daughter

Wedded Life, Death, And Marriage of F. S. Siebenkæs.

A Genuine Thorn Piece.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

A Wedding Day, succeeding a day of respite--The Counterparts--Dish

Quintette in two Courses--Table-talk--Six Arms and Hands.

CHAPTER II.

Home Fun--Sundry formal Calls--The Newspaper Article--A Love

Quarrel, and a few hard words--Antipathetic ink on the wall--

Friendship of the Satirists--Government of Kuhschnappel.

APPENDIX to CHAPTER II.

Government of the Imperial Market Borough of Kuhschnappel.

CHAPTER III.

Lenette's Honeymoon--Book Brewing--Schulrath Stiefel--Mr.

Everard--A Day before the Fair--The Red Cow--St. Michael's Fair--

The Beggars' Opera--Diabolical Temptation in the Wilderness, or

the Mannikin of Fashion--Autumn Joys--A New Labyrinth.

CHAPTER IV.

A Matrimonial Partie à la Guerre--Letter to that Hair Collector,

the Venner--Self-deceptions--Adam's Marriage Sermon--Shadowing

and Over-shadowing.

End of the Preface and of the First Book.

* * * * *

PREFACE to the Second, Third and Fourth Books.

PREFACE by the Author of 'Hesperus'.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.

The Broom and the Besom as Passion Implements--The Importance of a

Bookwriter--Diplomatic Negotiations and Discussions on the subject

of Candle Snuffing--The Pewter Cupboard--Domestic Hardships and

Enjoyments.

CHAPTER VI.

Matrimonial Jars--Extra Leaflet on the Loquacity of Women--More

Pledging--The Mortar and the Snuff-mill--A Scholar's Kiss--On

the Consolations of Humanity.

Continuation and Conclusion Of Chapter VI.

The Checked Calico Dress--More Pledges--Christian Neglect of the

Study of Judaism--A Helping Arm (of Leather) stretched forth from

the Clouds--The Auction.

CHAPTER VII.

The Shooting-Match--Rosa's Autumnal Campaign--Considerations

concerning Curses, Kisses, and the Militia.

CHAPTER VIII.

Scruples as to Payment of Debts--The Rich Pauper's Sunday

Throne-ceremonial--Artificial Flowers on the Grave--New Thistle

Seedlings of Contention.

First Flower Piece.

The Dead Christ proclaims that there is no God.

Second Flower piece.

A Dream within a Dream.

* * * * *

BOOK III.

CHAPTER IX.

A Potato War with Women--and with Men--A Walk in December--Tinder

for Jealousy--A War of Succession on the subject of a piece of

checked calico--Rupture with Stiefel--Sad Evening Music.

CHAPTER X.

A Lonely New-Year's Day--The Learned Schalaster--Wooden-leg of

Appeal--Chamber Postal Delivery--The 11th of February, and

Birth-day of the year 1786.

CHAPTER XI.

Leibgeber's Disquisition on Fame--Firmian's "Evening Paper".

CHAPTER XII.

The Flight out of Egypt--The Glories of Travel?--The Unknown

Bayreuth--Baptism in a Storm--Nathalie and the Hermitage--The

most important Conversation in all this Book--An Evening of

Friendship.

CHAPTER XIII.

A Clock of Human Beings--A Cold Shoulder--The Venner.

CHAPTER XIV.

A Lover's Dismissal--Fantaisie--The Child with the Bouquet--The

Eden of the Night, and the Angel at the Gate of Paradise.

First Fruit Piece.

Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of _I_

into _Thou_, _He_, _She_, _Ye_, and _They_; or the Feast of

Kindness of the 20th March.

Postscript by Jean Paul.

* * * * *

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER XV.

Rosa von Meyern--Tone-Echoes and After-Breezes from the loveliest

of all Nights--Letters of Nathalie and Firmian--Table-talk by

Leibgeber.

CHAPTER XVI.

The Homeward Journey, with all its Pleasures--The Arrival at Home.

CHAPTER XVII.

The Butterfly Rosa in the Form of Mining Caterpillar--Thorn-crowns,

and Thistle-heads of Jealousy.

CHAPTER XVIII.

After-Summer of Marriage--Preparations for Death.

CHAPTER XIX.

The Apparition--Homecoming of the Storms in August, or the last

Quarrel--The Raiment of the Children of Israel.

CHAPTER XX.

Apoplexy--The President of the Board of Health--The Notary-Public--

The last Will and Testament--The Knight's Move--Revel, the Morning

Preacher--The Second Apoplectic Attack.

CHAPTER XXI.

Dr. [Oe]lhafen and Medical Boot and Shoemaking--The Burial Society--

A Death's Head in the Saddle--Frederick II. and his Funeral

Oration.

CHAPTER XXII.

Journey through Fantaisie--Re-union on the Bindlocher Mountain--

Berneck--Man-doubling--Gefrees--Exchange of Clothes--Münchberg--

Solo-whistling--Hof--The Stone of Gladness and Double-parting.

CHAPTER XXIII.

Days in Vaduz--Nathalie's Letter--A New Year's Wish--Wilderness

of Destiny and the Heart.

CHAPTER XXIV.

News from Kuhschnappel--Woman's Anticlimax--Opening of the Seventh

Seal.

CHAPTER XXV., AND LAST.

The Journey--The Churchyard--The Spectre--The End of the Trouble,

and of the Book.

PREFACE,

WITH WHICH I WAS OBLIGED TO PUT JACOB OEHRMANN, GENERAL DEALER, TO

SLEEP, BECAUSE I WISHED TO NARRATE THE "DOG POST DAYS"[4] AND

THESE PRESENT "FLOWER-PIECES," &C., &C., TO HIS DAUGHTER.

On Christmas Eve of 1794, when I came from the publishers of the two

works in question, and from Berlin, to the town of Scheerau, I went

straight from the mail coach to the house of Mr. Jacob Oehrmann (whose

law affairs I had formerly attended to), having with me letters from

Vienna which might be of considerable service to him. A child can see

at a glance that at that time there was no idea of anything connected

with such a matter as a Preface in my head. It was very cold--being the

24th of December--the street lamps were lighted, and I was frozen as

stiff as the fawn which had been my fellow-passenger (a "blind" one[5]),

by the coach. In the shop itself, which was full of draughts and other

kinds of wind, it was impossible for a preface-maker of any sense,

such as myself, to set to work, because there was a young lady

preface-maker--Oehrmann's daughter and shop-girl--already at work making

oral prefaces to the little books she was selling--Christmas almanacs

of the best of all kinds--duodecimo books, printed on unsized paper

indeed, but full of real fragments of the golden and silver

ages--I mean, the little books of mottoes, all gold and silver leaf,

with which the blessed Christmas gilds its gifts like the autumn, or

silvers them over like the winter. I don't blame the poor shop-wench

that, besieged as she was by such a crowd of Christmas Eve customers,

she hardly had a nod to throw at me, old acquaintance as I was; and,

although I had only that moment arrived from Berlin, she showed me in

to her father at once.

All was in a glow in there, Jacob Oehrmann as well as his

counting-house. He, too, was sitting over a book, not as a

preface-maker, however, but as a registrator and epitomator; he was

balancing his ledger. He had added up his balance-sheet twice over

already, but, to his horror, the credit side was always a Swiss

oertlein (that is, 13½ kreuzers, Zürich currency) more than the debit

side. The man's attention was wholly fixed upon the driving-wheel of

the calculating machine inside his head; he hardly noticed me, well as

he knew me, and though I had Vienna letters. To mercantile people, who,

like the carriers they employ, are at home all the world over, and to

whom the remotest trading powers are daily sending ambassadors and

envoyés, namely, commercial travellers--to them, I say, it makes little

difference whether it be Berlin, Boston, or Byzance, that one happens

to arrive from.

Being well accustomed to this commercial indifference to fellow

mortals, I stood quietly by the fire, and had my thoughts, which shall

here be made the reader's property.

I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in

general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three

parts--into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public,

just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body,

Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of

scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in

business--that true _corpus callosum_ of the German empire--buys and

uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of _body_), and

deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and

consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class

the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other

only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of

the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in

a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his 'Enumeration of the

Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,'

has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or

theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day

with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of "wizard" and

"witchmaster,"--whose _spiritus rector_ and grand master seems to have

been the devil himself--having got degraded to a name applied to great

and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up

with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable

case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has

recognised official positions--can lecture on his own subjects; but the

poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment--(if he did he would

no longer be "born," he would be "made" by the Imperial Chancery), and

people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it

in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of

expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal

edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court

of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases--and

that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never

_copious_ enough or _condensed_ enough. At the same time, I at once

admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very

much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its

song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny,

jerking water-wagtails.

The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is

composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it

in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages,

where there's nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and

upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.

The Art-public, the Spirit, I might, perhaps, leave altogether out of

consideration; the few who have a taste, not only for all kinds of

taste, and for the taste of all nations, but for higher, almost

cosmopolitan beauties, such as Herder, Goethe, Lessing, Wieland and one

or two more--an author has little need to trouble himself about _their_

votes, they are in such a minority, and moreover, they don't read him.

At all events, they don't deserve the dedication with which I, at

the fireside, came to the conclusion that I would bribe the great

Buying-public, which is, of course, what keeps the book trade going. I

resolved, in fact, regularly to dedicate my 'Hesperus,' or the

'Kuhschnappler Siebenkæs,' to Jacob Oehrmann; and through him, as it

were, to the Buying-public. To wit, in this way:--

Jacob Oehrmann is not a man to be despised, I can tell you. He served

as porter of the Stock Exchange in Amsterdam for four years, and rang

the Exchange bell from 11.45 till 12 o'clock. Soon after this, by

scraping and pinching, he _became_ a "pretty rich house" (though he

_kept_ a very poor one), and rose to the dignity of seal-keeper of a

whole collection of knightly seals pasted on to noble, escheated,

promises to pay. True, like celebrated authors, he assumed no municipal

offices, preferring to do nothing but write; but the town militia of

Scheerau, whose hearts are always in the right place (that is to say,

the safest), and who bravely exhibit themselves to passing troops as a

watchful corps of _observation_, insisted upon making him their

captain, though he would have been quite content to have been nothing

but their cloth contractor. He is honest enough, particularly in his

dealings with the mercantile world; and, far from burning the laws of

the Church, like Luther, all he burns even of the municipal law is a

title or two of the Seventh Commandment, indeed, he only _makes_ a

_beginning_ at burning them, as the Vienna censorship does with

prohibited books; and even this only in the cases of carriers, debtors,

and people of rank. Before a man of this stamp I can, without any

qualms of conscience, burn a little sweet-smelling incense, and make

his Dutch face appear magnified, to some extent, like a spectre's

through magic vapour.

Now I thought I should portray, in his likeness, some of the more

striking features of the great Buying-public; for he is a sort of

portable miniature of it--like itself, he cares only for bread-studies,

and beer-studies, for no talk but table-talk, no literature but

politics--he knows that the magnet was only created to hold up his

shop-door key if he chooses to stick it on to it--the tourmaline only

to collect his tobacco ashes, his daughter Pauline to take the place of

both (although she attracts stronger things, and with greater

attractive power than either)--he knows no higher thing in the world

than bread, and detests the town painter, who uses it to rub out pencil

marks with. He and his three sons, who are immured in three of the

Hanse towns, read or write no other, and no less important, books than

the waste-book and the ledger.

* * * * *

"May I be d--d," thought I, as I was warming myself at the stove, "if I

can paint the Buying-public to greater perfection than under the name

of Jacob Oehrmann, who is but a twig, or fibre, of it; but then it

couldn't possibly know what I meant" it occurred to me; and on account

of this error in my calculations, I have to-day hit upon quite another

plan.

Just as I had committed my error the daughter came in, rectified her

father's, and brought out the balance correctly. Oehrmann looked at me

now, and became to some extent conscious of my existence; and, on my

presenting the Vienna epistles by way of credentials (epistles of this

kind are more to him than poetical, or St. Pauline, epistles)--from

being a mere fresco figure on the wall, as I had been up to that time,

I became a something possessed of a mind and a stomach, and I was asked

(together with the latter) to stay to supper.

Now, although the critics may set all the cliques and circles of

Germany about my ears--aye, and have a new Turkish bell cast specially

for the purpose--I mean to make a clean breast of it here, and state in

plain words that it was solely on account of the daughter that I came,

and that I stayed, there. I knew that the darling would have read all

my recent books, if the old man had given her time to do it; and for

that very reason it was impossible for me to blink the fact that it was

incumbent upon me as a simple duty to talk, if not to sing, her father

to sleep, and then tell his daughter all that I had been telling the

world, though the agency of the press. This, as of course you perceive,

was why I usually came there to have a talk on the evenings of his

foreign mail days, when it didn't take much to put him to sleep.

On the Christmas Eve, then, what I had to do was to condense and

abridge my "45 Dog Post Days" into the space of about the same number

of minutes; a longish business, rendering a sleep of no brief duration

necessary.

I wish Messrs. the Editors and Reviewers, who find much to blame in

this proceeding of mine, could have just sat down, for once in their

lives, on the sofa beside my namesake Johanna Paulina; they would have

related to her most of my biographical histories in those cleverly

epitomised forms in which they communicate them in their magazines and

papers to audiences of a very different type. They would have been

beside themselves with rapture at the truth and felicity of her

remarks, at the natural, unaffected, simplicity and sincerity of her

manner, at the innocence of her heart, and at her lively sense of

humour, and they would have taken hold of her hand, and cried "let the

author treat us to comedies half as delicious as this one which is

sitting beside us now, and he is the man for us." Indeed, had these

gentlemen, the editors and reviewers, got to know a little more than

they do about the art of briefly extracting the pith and marrow of a

book, and had they been able to move Pauline just a little more than I

think such great critical functionaries could be expected to do; and

had they then seen, or more properly, nearly _lost_ sight of, that

gentle face of hers as it melted away in a dew of tears (because girls

and gold are the _softer_ and the more _impressionable_ the _purer_

they are), and had they, as of course they would have done, in the

heavenliness of their emotion, well-nigh clean forgotten themselves,

and the snoring father----

* * * * *

Good gracious! I have got into a tremendous state over it myself, and

shall keep the preface till to-morrow. It is clear that it must be gone

on with in a calmer mood.

* * * * *

I thought I might take it for granted that the master of the house

would have tired himself so much with letter-writing on the Christmas

Eve, that all that would be wanted to put him to sleep would be some

person who should hasten the process by talking in a long-winded and

tedious style. I considered myself to be that person. However, at

first, while supper was going on, I only introduced subjects which he

would understand. While he was plying his spoon and fork, and till

grace had been said, a sleep of any duration was more than could be

expected of him. Wherefore I entertained him with matter of interest

and amusement, such as my blind fellow-passenger (the fawn), one or two

stoppages of payment--my opinions on the French War, and the high

prices of everything--that Frederick Street, Berlin, was half a mile in

length--that there was great freedom, both of the press and of trade,

in that city. I also mentioned that in most parts of Germany which I

had visited, I had found that the beggar boys were the "revising

barristers" of and "lodgers of appeals" against the newspaper writers;

that is to say, that the newspaper makers bring to life, with their

ink, the people who are killed in battle, and are able to avail

themselves of these resurrected ones in the next "affaire;" whilst the

soldiers' children, on the other hand, like to kill their fathers and

then beg upon the lists of killed: they shoot their fathers dead for a

halfpenny each, and the newspaper evangelists bring them to life again

for a penny. And thus these two classes of the community are, in a

beautiful manner, by reciprocity of lying, the one the antidote to the

other. This is the reason why neither a newspaper writer, nor an

orthographer, can strictly adhere to Klopstock's orthographical rule,

only to _write_ what you _hear_.

When the cloth was off, I saw that it was time for me to set my foot to

work at the rocking of Captain Oehrmann's cradle. My 'Hesperus' is too

big a book. On other occasions I should have had time enough. On these

occasions all I had to do to get the great Dutch tulip to close its

petals in sleep was, to begin with wars and rumours of wars--then

introduce the Law of Nature, or rather the _Laws_ of Nature, seeing

that every fair and every war provides a fresh supply--from this point

I had but a short step to arrive at the most sublime axioms of moral

science, thus dipping the merchant before he knew where he was into the

deepest centre of the health-giving mineral well of truth. Or I lighted

up sundry new systems (of my own invention), held them under his nose,

attacked and refuted them, benumbing and narcotising him with the smoke

till he fell down senseless. Then came freedom! Then his daughter and I

would open the window to the stars and the flowers outside, while I

placed before the poor famished soul a rich supply of the loveliest

poetical honey-bearing blossoms. Such had been my process on previous

occasions. But this evening I took a shorter path. As soon as grace was

said, I got as near as I could to complete unintelligibility, and

proposed to the house of business of Oehrmann's soul (his body) the

following query: whether there were not more Kartesians than Newtonists

among the princes of Germany. "I do not mean as regards the animal

world," I continued slowly and tediously. "Kartesius, as we know, is of

opinion that the animals are insentient machines, and consequently,

man, the noblest of animals, would be improperly comprehended in this

dictum; what my meaning is, and what I want to know, is this--do not

the majority (of the princes of Germany) consider that the essentiality

of a realm consists in EXTENSION, as Kartesius holds that of matter to

do, only the minority of them holding, as Newton (a greater man) does

of matter, that its essentiality consists in SOLIDITY."

He terrified me by answering with the greatest liveliness, and as broad

awake as you please, "There are only two of them that can pay their

way--the Prince of Flachsenfingen and the Prince of----"

At this point his daughter placed a basket of clothes come from the

wash upon the table, and a little box of letters upon the basket, and

set to work printing her brothers' names at full length upon their

shirts. As she took out of the basket a tall white festival tiara for

her father, and took away from him the base Saturday cowl which he had

on, I was incited to become as obscure and as long-winded as the

night-cap and my own designs called upon me to be.

Now, as there is nothing about which he is so utterly indifferent as my

books, and polite literature in all its branches, I determined to

settle him, once for all, with this detested stuff. I succeeded in

pumping out what follows.

"I almost fear, Captain, that you must have rather wondered that I have

never enabled you to make acquaintance in anything like a very detailed

or explicit manner with my two latest _opuscula_, or little works; the

elder of the two is, curiously enough, called 'Dog Post Days,' and the

later 'Flower-pieces.' Perhaps, if I just give you a slight idea

to-night of the principal points of my forty-five Dog Post Days, and

then fetch up with the Flower-pieces this day week, I shall be doing a

little towards making amends for my negligence. Of course, it's my

fault alone, and nobody else's, if you find you don't quite know what

the first of the two may be _about_--whether you are to suppose it to

be a work on heraldry or on insects--or a dictionary of some particular

dialect--or an ancient codex--or a Lexicon Homericum--or a collection

of inaugural disputations--or a ready reckoner--or an epic poem--or a

volume of funeral sermons. It really _is_ nothing but an interesting

story, with threads of all the above subjects woven into it, however. I

should be very glad myself, Captain, if it were better than it is; and

particularly I wish it were written with that degree of lucidity that

one could half read it, and half compose it even, in his sleep. I do

not know, Captain, quite what your canons of criticism may be, and

hence I cannot say whether your taste is British or Greek. I must admit

that I shrewdly suspect that it is not much in the book's favour that

there are parts of it to be found--I hope not very many--in which there

are more meanings than one, of all kinds of metaphors and flowery

styles hashed up together, or an outside semblance of gravity with no

reality behind it, but only mere fun (you see Germans insist upon a

businesslike style), and (which I am most of all afraid is the case),

though the book is of some considerable extent, my attempts at

imitating the romances of chivalry so popular in the present day (which

so often _seem_ as if they really must have been written by the old

_artless_ knights themselves, fellows who were better at wielding the

heavy two-handed sword than the light goose quill)--that my attempts, I

say, at imitating these romances have scarcely been attended with that

amount of success at which I have aimed at attaining. Perhaps, too, I

might oftener have offended the modesty and the ears of the ladies, as

many men of the world have thought I might; for, indeed, books which do

not offend the ears of the great--but only those of the chaste--are not

considered the most objectionable."

I saw here, when too late, that I had struck on a subject which

enlivened him up prodigiously. I did, indeed, instantly make a jump to

a quite different topic, saying, "it is probably the safest way of all,

to have improper books deposited in _public_ libraries, where the

librarians are of the usual type, because the rudeness of their manners

and their disagreeable behaviour, does more to prevent these books from

being read than an edict of the censorship." But Jacobus would speak

out his thought, "Pauline, don't let me forget that the woman Stenzin

hasn't paid her fine yet."

It was uncommonly annoying that, just when I got sleep lured on to

within a step or two of him, the Captain should all of a sudden draw

his trigger and let off a thing calculated to blow all my sleeping

powder to the four winds of heaven. There is nobody more difficult to

weary than a person who wearies everybody else. I would rather

undertake to weary out a lady who happens to have nothing to do in five

minutes' time, than a man of business in as many hours.

Pauline, the darling, anxious to hear the stories which I had

accompanied in manuscript to Berlin, put slowly into my hand one by one

the following letters from her letterbox: "STORY"--i. e. she wanted to

be told the "Dog Post Days" that evening.

So I set to work again, and, with a sigh, began in this way: "The fact

is, Mr. Oehrmann, that your humble servant here will soon be setting

letters of this sort flying about in Berlin, by his new book, and my

'Post Days' may be printed on shirts quite as fine as those your sons'

names are being printed upon, if the people happen to have made their

paper from such. But, indeed, I must admit to you that as I was sitting

on the coach on my way to Berlin, with my right foot under my

manuscripts, and my left beneath a bale of petitions on their way to

the Prince of Scheerau, with the army, the only thing I had in the way

of a comforting thought was this very natural one, 'Devil make a better

of it all!' Only he's just the very last person to _do it_. For, good

heavens! in an age like this present age of ours, when the instruments

of universal world history are only _being tuned_ in the orchestra

before the concert begins, that is to say, are all grumbling and

squeaking together in confusion (which was why on one occasion the

tuning of the orchestra pleased a Morocco Ambassador at Vienna much

better than the opera itself)--in such an age, when it is so hard to

tell the coward from the brave man--him who lets everything go as it

pleases from him who strives to do something great and good--those who

are withering up from those who are flourishing and promising fruit,

just as in winter the fruit-bearing trees look much the same as the

dead ones--in such an age, there is only one consolation for an author,

one which I have not yet spoken of to-night, and it is this: that,

after all, though it be an age in which the nobler kinds of virtue,

love, and freedom, are the rarest of Phœnixes and birds of the sun,

he can manage to put up with it, and can go on drawing vivid pictures

and writing lively descriptions of all the birds in question, until

they wing their way to us in the body. Doubtless, when the originals of

the pictures _have_ fairly come and taken up their abode here on earth,

then will all our panegyrics of them be out of place, and loathsome to

the palate, and a mere threshing of empty straw. People who are

_incapable of business_ can work for the press."

"There's work, and there's work," the merchant, wide awake, struck in;

"it all depends---- Now TRADE keeps a man; but book-writing isn't much

better than spinning cotton, and spinning is next door to begging--not

meaning anything personal to yourself. But all the broken-down

book-keepers and bankrupt tradesmen take to the making of

books--arithmetic books, and so on."

The public sees what a poor opinion this shopkeeper-captain had of me,

because _my_ business was only the making of books, though in old days

I had been continually running in to him day and night, as notary

depute, for the protesting of bills. I know the sort of view many

people take of the _convenances_ of society; but I think anyone on

earth will consider that, after being treated in this style, I was to

be excused for going quite wild on the spot, and responding to the

fellow's impertinence, although he was no longer quite in his five

senses, in no less formidable a manner than by repeating, accurately

and without abridgment, my "extra leaflets" from my 'Hesperus.'

This, of course, was bound to put him to death--sleep, I mean.

And then thousands of propitious stars arose for the daughter and the

author--then commenced our feast of unleavened bread--then I could sit

down with her at the front window, and tell her all that which the

public has for some time had in its hands. Truly there can be nothing

sweeter than to some kind tender heart, hemmed in on all sides and

besieged by sermons--which cannot refresh itself at so much as a

birthday ball, were it only the superintendent's and his wife's, nor

with a novel, though its author be the family legal adviser: to such a

beleaguered famishing heart, I say, it is more delicious than virgin

honey to march up with a strong army of relief, and, taking hold of

some mesh in the nun's veil which is over the soul, tear it wider, let

her peep through and look out at the glimmer of some flowery eastern

land--to wile the tears of her dreams to her waking eyes--to lift her

beyond her own longings, and at a stroke set free the fond tender

heart, long heavy with yearning, and bound in bitter slavery--to set it

free, and to rock it softly up and down in the fresh spring breeze of

poesy, while the dewy warmth gives birth to flowers therein of fairer

growth than those of the country round.

I had just finished by one o'clock. I had taken only three hours to the

three volumes of my story, because I had torn out all the "extra

leaves." "If the father is the Buying-public, the daughter is the

Reading-public, and we must not plague her with anything that's not

purely historical," I said, and sacrificed my most precious

digressions, for which, moreover, such an enchanting neighbourhood is

not quite the proper soil.

Then the old man coughed, got up from his chair, asked what o'clock it

was, wished me good night, and opening the door saw me out (thereby

depriving me of a good one), and saw me no more till that night week,

on New Year's Eve.

My readers will remember that I had promised to come on that evening,

because I had to make a brief report to my client concerning my

"Flower-pieces"--this very book.

I assure the gentle reader that I shall report the events of the

evening exactly as they occurred.

I appeared again, then, on the last evening of the year 1794, on the

red waves of which so many bodies, bled to death, were borne away to

the Ocean of Eternity. My client received me with a coldness which I

attributed partly to that of the temperature outside (for both men and

wolves are most ferocious in hard frost), partly to the Vienna letters

which I had--NOT with me; and on the whole, I had but little to say to

the fellow on this occasion. As, besides, I was going to leave Scheerau

on the New Year's Day by the Thursday coach, and was very anxious to

lay before my dear Pauline some more _Paulina_, namely these sketches,

because I knew that whatever other wares she might find upon her

counter, these wouldn't be among them--I consider that no editor who

has any principles whatever can possibly get into a passion at my

_having_ duly appeared. Let any hot-headed person of the sort just

listen to the plan I had. I wanted first to give to this silent

soul-flower the FLOWER-PIECES, two dreams made of flowers put together

mosaic-fashion--next the Thorn-pieces,[6] from which I had to break

away the thorns, that is, the satires, so that nothing remained but a

mere curious story and lastly, the Fruit-piece was to be served up

last, as it is in the book itself, by way of dessert; and in this ripe

fruit (from which I had previously orally expressed all the chilling

ice-apple juice of philosophy, which the press has, however, left in) I

meant to appear at the end of the day, myself as Appleworm. This would

have led by easy steps to my departure or farewell; for I did not

know whether I should ever again see or hear of Pauline, this

flower-polypus, stretching out eyeless, palpitating, tentacula, from

mere INSTINCT towards the LIGHT. With the old decayed wood on which the

polyp was blooming I, of course, having no Vienna letters, had little

to do.

But near as it was to the time for wishing new year's wishes, the old

year was doomed to end with wishes unfulfilled.

Yet I have little to blame myself about; for, as soon as ever I came

in, I did my best to tire out the live East India House and put him to

sleep, and I continued to do so while he sat there. The only agreeable

remarks I made to him were, that when he had said some insulting things

about my successor, his present legal adviser, I extended them so as to

apply them to the legal profession in general, thus elevating the mere

pasquinade into the nobler satire: "I always picture lawyers and

clients as two strings of people with buckets or purses near a kind of

engine for quenching money thirst--the one row, the clients, always

passing away with their buckets, or purses, empty, and the other row

standing and handing each other buckets or purses full," said I.

I think it was not otherwise than on purpose, that I painted to him the

great Buying-public with lineaments much like his own--for he is a

small Buying-public, only a few feet long and broad. In fact, I made on

him an experiment to ascertain what the Buying-public itself would say

to the following ideas.

"The public of the present day, Captain, is gradually getting to be a

flourishing North India Company, and, it seems to me, it will soon

rival the Dutch, amongst whom butter and books are articles of _export_

trade only; the attic salt _they_ have a taste for, is that which

BENKELSZOON used for pickling fish with. Though they have provided

Erasmus, in consideration of _his_ salt (of a better quality), with a

statue (he never _ate_ salt, by the way), yet I think this was

excusable in them, when we remember that they first had one erected to

the fish-curer in question. Even CAMPE, who by no means classes the

inventors of the spinning-wheel and of Brunswick beer beneath the

constructors and brewers of epic poems, will coincide with me when I

say that the German is really being made something of at the present

day; that he is positively becoming a serious, solid, well-grounded

fellow--a tradesman, a man of business; a man getting past his youthful

follies, who knows _edible_ from _cogitable_ matter (when he sees it),

and can winnow out the latter from the former; who can distinguish the

printer from the publisher, and the bookseller (as the more important)

from both; he is becoming a speculative individual who, like the hens

who run from a harp string with fox-gut, can't bear the noise of

any poet's harp whatever, were it strung with the harper's own

heart-strings--and who will soon come to suffer no pictorial art to

exist, except upon bales of merchandise,[7] nor any printing except

calico-printing."

Here I saw, to my amazement, that the merchant was asleep already, and

had shut the window-shutters of his senses. I was a good deal annoyed

that I had been standing in awe of him, as well as talking to him, all

this time unnecessarily; I had been playing the part of the Devil, and

he that of King Solomon, supposed by the evil one to be alive when he

was dead.[8]

Meantime, with the view of not waking him up by means of a sudden

change of key, I went on talking to him as if nothing had happened,

speaking to him all the time I was slipping away from him further and

further towards the window with an exceedingly gradual _diminuendo_ of

my tone, as follows:--"And of such a public as this, I quite expect

that a time will come when it will value shoe leather much above

altar-pieces,[9] and that, when the moral and philosophical credit of

any philosopher chances to be in question, its first inquiry of all

will be, 'is the fellow _solvent_?' And further, my beloved listener (I

continued in the same tone, so as not to run the risk of waking the

sleeper by any change in the _kind_ of sound), it is to be hoped and

expected that I shall now have an opportunity of going through, for

your entertainment, my Flower-pieces, which have not even been

committed to paper as yet, and which I can quite easily finish this

evening, if _he_ (father Jacobus) will have the goodness to sleep long

enough."

I commenced, accordingly, as follows:--

P.S. But it would be too utterly ridiculous altogether, if I were to

have the whole of the Flower and Thorn pieces, which are all in the

book itself, printed over again in the _preface_! At the end of book

the first, however, I shall give the continuation and conclusion of

this preface, and of the New Year's Eve, and shall then go on with the

second book, so that it may be ready for the Easter fair.

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

HOF, _7th November_, 1796.

WEDDED LIFE, DEATH AND MARRIAGE

OF

F. S. SIEBENKÆS,

PARISH ADVOCATE IN THE ROYAL BURGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

* * *

A GENUINE THORN PIECE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

A WEDDING DAY, SUCCEEDING A DAY OF RESPITE--THE COUNTERPARTS--DISH

QUINTETTE IN TWO COURSES--TABLE-TALK--SIX ARMS AND HANDS.

Siebenkæs, parish advocate[10] for the royal borough of Kuhschnappel,

had spent the whole of Monday at his attic-window watching for his wife

that was to be, who had been expected to arrive from Augspurg a little

before service-time, so as to get a sip of something warm before going

to church for the wedding.

The Schulrath of the place, happening to be returning from Augspurg,

had promised to bring the bride with him as return cargo, strapping her

wedding outfit on to his trunk behind.

She was an Augspurger by birth--only daughter of the deceased

Engelkraut, clerk of the Lutheran Council--and she lived in the

Fuggery, in a roomy mansion which was probably bigger than many

drawing-rooms are. She was by no means portionless, for she lived by

her own work, not on other people's, as penisoned court-ladies'-maids

do. She had all the newest fashions in bonnets and other headgear in

her hands earlier than the richest ladies of the neighbourhood, albeit

in such miniature editions that not even a duck could have got them on;

and she erected edifices for the female head at a few days' notice, on

a large scale, after these miniature sketches and small-scale plans of

them.

All that Siebenkæs did during his long wait was to depose on oath (more

than once) that it was the devil who invented _seeking_, and his

grandmother who devised _waiting_. At length, while it was still pretty

early, came, not the bride, but a night post from Augspurg, with an

epistle from the Schulrath to say that he and the lady "could

not possibly arrive before Tuesday. She was still busy at her

wedding-clothes, and he in the libraries of the ex-Jesuits, and of

Privy Councillor Zopf, and (among the antiquities) at the city gates."

Siebenkæs's butterfly-proboscis, however, found plenty of open honey

cells in every blue thistle blossom of his fate; he could now, on this

idle Monday, make a final application of the arm file and agate

burnisher to his room, brush out the dust and the writing-sand with the

feather of a quill from his table, rout out the accumulations of bits

of paper and other rubbish from behind the mirror, wash, with

unspeakable labour, the white porcelain inkstand into a more dazzling

whiteness, and bring the butter-boat and the coffee-pot into a more

advanced and prominent position (drawing them up in rank and file on

the cupboard), and polish the brass nails on the grandfather's leather

arm-chair till they shone again. This new temple-purification of his

chamber he undertook merely by way of something to do; for a scholar

considers the mere _arranging_ of his books and papers to _be_ a

purification as of the temple, at least so maintained the parish

advocate, saying further, "orderliness is, properly defined, nothing

but a happy knack which people acquire of putting a thing for twenty

years in the _old_ place, let that place be where it will."

Not only was he tenant of a pleasant room, but also of a long red

dining-table, which he had hired and placed beside a commoner one; also

of some high-backed arm-chairs: moreover the landlords or proprietors

of the furniture and of the lodgings (who all lived in the house) had

all been invited by him to dinner on this his play Monday, which was an

excellent arrangement, inasmuch as--most of the people of the house

being working-men--their play Monday and his fell together; for it was

only the landlord who was anything superior, and he was a wig-maker.

I should have had cause to feel ashamed of myself had I gone and used

my precious historical colours in portraying a mere advocate of the

poor (a fit candidate for his _own_ services in that capacity). But I

have had access to the documents and accounts relating to my hero's

guardianship during his minority, and from these I can prove, at any

hour, in a court of justice, that he was a man worth at least 1200

Rhenish guldens (_i.e_. 100_l_.), to say nothing of the interest. Only,

unfortunately, the study of the ancients, added to his own natural turn

of mind, had endowed him with an invincible contempt for money, that

metallic mainspring of the machinery of our human existence, that dial

plate on which our value is read off, although people of sense,

tradespeople for example, have quite as high an opinion of the man who

acquires, as of him who gets rid of it; just as a person who is

electrified gets a shining glory round his head whether the fluid be

passing into or out of him. Indeed, Siebenkæs even said (and on one

occasion he did it) that we ought sometimes to put on the beggar's

scrip in jest, simply to accustom the back to it against more serious

times. And he considered that he justified (as well as complimented)

himself in going on to say, "It is easier to bear poverty like

Epictetus than to choose it like Antoninus; in the same way that it is

easier for a slave to stick out his own leg to be cut off, than for a

man who wields a sceptre a yard long to leave the legs of his slaves

alone." Wherefore he made shift to live for ten years in foreign parts,

and for half a year in the imperial burgh, without asking his guardian

for a single halfpenny of the interest of his capital. But as it was

his idea to introduce his orphan, moneyless bride as mistress and

overseer into a silver mine all ready opened and timbered for her

reception (for such he considered his 100_l_. with the accumulated

interest to be), it had pleased him to give her to understand, while he

was in Augspurg, that he had nothing but his bare bread, and that what

little he _could_ scrape together by the sweat of his brow, went from

hand to mouth, though he worked as hard as any man, and cared little

about the Upper House of Parliament or the Lower. "I'll be handed," he

had long ago said, "if I ever marry a woman who knows how much I have a

year. As it is, women often look upon a husband as a species of demon,

to whom they sign away their souls--often their child--that the evil

one may give them money and eatables."

This longest of summer days and Mondays was followed by the longest of

winter nights (which is impossible only in an astronomical sense).

Early next morning, the Schulrath Stiefel drove up, and lifted out of

the carriage (fine manners have twice their charm when they adorn a

scholar) a bonnet-block instead of the bride, and ordered the rest of

her belongings, which consisted of a white tinned box, to be unloaded,

while he, with her head under his arm, ran upstairs to the advocate.

"Your worthy intended," he said, "is coming directly. She is getting

ready at this moment, in a farm cottage, for the sacred rite, and

begged me to come on before, lest you should be impatient. A true

woman, in Solomon's sense of the term, and I congratulate you most

heartily."

"The Heir Advocate Siebenkæs, my pretty lady?--I can conduct you to him

myself. He lodges with me, and I will wait upon you this moment," said

the wig-maker, down at the door, and offered his hand to lead her up:

but, as she caught sight of her second bonnet-block, still sitting in

the carriage, she took it on her left arm as if it had been a baby (the

hairdresser in vain attempting to get hold of it), and followed him

with a hesitating step into the advocate's room. She held out her right

hand only, with a deep curtsey and gentle greeting, to her bridegroom,

and on her full round face (everything in it was round, brow, eyes,

mouth, and chin) the roses far out-bloomed the lilies, and were all the

prettier to look upon as seen below the large black silk bonnet; while

the snow-white muslin dress, the many-tinted nosegay of artificial

flowers, and the white points of her shoes, added charm upon charm to

her timid figure. She at once untied her bonnet--there being barely

time to get one's hair done and be married--and laid her garland, which

she had hidden at the farm that the people might not see it, down upon

the table, that her head might be properly put to rights, and powdered

for the ceremony (as a person's of quality ought to be) by the

landlord, thus conveniently at hand.

Thou dear Lenette! A bride is, it is true, during many days, for

everyone whom she's not going to many, a poor meagre piece of

shewbread--and especially is she so to me. But I except one hour,

namely, that on the morning of the wedding-day, when the girl, whose

life has been all freedom hitherto, trembling in her wedding dress,

overgrown (like an ivied tree) with flowers and feathers, which, with

others like them, fate is soon to pluck away--and with anxious pious

eyes overflowing on her mother's heart for the last and loveliest time;

this hour, I say, moves me, in which, standing all adorned on the

scaffold of joy, she celebrates so many partings, and one single

meeting: when the mother turns away from her and goes back to her other

children, leaving her, all fainthearted, to a stranger. "Thou heart,

beating high with happiness," I think then, "not always wilt thou throb

thus throughout the sultry years of wedded life; often wilt thou pour

out thine own blood, the better to pass along the path to age, as the

chamois hunter keeps his foot from sliding by the blood from his own

heel." And then I would fain go out to the gazing, envious virgins by

the wayside leading to the church, and say to them, "Do not so begrudge

the poor girl the happiness of a, perhaps fleeting, illusion. Ah, what

you and she are looking at to-day is the strife- and beauty-apple of

marriage hanging only on the sunny side of love, all red and soft; no

one sees the green sour side of the apple hidden in the shade. And if

ye have ever been grieved to the soul for some luckless wife who has

chanced, ten years after her wedding, to come upon her old bridal

dress, in a drawer, while tears for all the sweet illusions she has

lost in these ten years rise in a moment to her eyes, are you so sure

it will be otherwise with this envied one who passes before you all joy

and brightness now?"

I should not, however, have performed this unexpected modulation into

the "remote key" of tenderheartedness, had it not been that I managed

to form to myself a picture so irresistibly vivid of Lenette's myrtle

wreath, beneath her hat (I really had not the slightest intention to

touch on the subject of my own personal feelings), and her being all

alone without a mother, and her powdery white-flower face, and (more

vivid still) of the ready willingness with which she put her young

delicate arms (she was scarcely past nineteen) into the polished

handcuffs and chain-rings of matrimony, without so much as looking

round her to see which way she was going to be led by them----

I could here hold up my hand and take oath that the bridegroom was

quite as much moved as myself, if not more so; at all events, when he

gently wiped the Auricula dust from the blossom-face, so that the

flowers there were seen to bloom unobscured. But he had to be careful

how he carried about that heart of his--so full to the brim of the

potion of love, and tears of gladness--lest it should run over in the

presence of the jovial hairdresser and the serious Schulrath, to his

shame. Effusion was a thing he never permitted himself. All strong

feeling, even of the purest, he hid away, and hardened over: he always

thought of poets and actors, who let on the waterworks of their

emotions to play for show; and there was no one, on the whole, at whom

he bantered so much as at himself. For these reasons, his face to-day

was drawn and crinkled by a queer, laughing, embarrassment, and only

his eyes, where the moisture gleamed, told of the better side of this

condition. As he noticed presently that he wasn't masking himself

sufficiently by merely playing the part of barber's mate, and

commissary of provisions (of the breakfast), he adopted stronger

measures, and began to exhibit himself and his movable property in as

favourable a light as possible to Lenette, inquiring of her whether she

didn't think her room "nicely situated," and saying, "I can see into

the senate house window, on to the great table, and all the ink

bottles. Several of these chairs I got last spring at a third of their

value, and very handsome they are, don't you think so? My good old

grandfather's chair here, though" (he had sat down in it, and laid his

lean arms on the chair's stuffed ones), "does, I think, take the

precedence in the grandfather dance:[11] 'how they so softly rest,' arm

upon arm! The flowers upon my table-cloth are rather cleverly done, but

the coffee-tray is considered the better work of the two, I am given to

understand, on account of its flora being japanned; however, they both

do their best in the flower line. My Leyser with his pigskin

'Meditations' is a great ornament to the room: the kitchen, though,

is the place--better still than this room; there are pots, all

ranged side by side--and all sorts of things--the hare-skinner and the

hare-spit--my father used to shoot the hares for these."

The bride smiled on him so contentedly that I must almost believe she

had heard the greater part of the story of the 100_l_. (with interest)

in her Fuggery through twenty united ear- and speaking-trumpets. I

shall be the more inclined to believe this if the public should happen

to be looking forward eagerly to the hour when he is to hand it over to

her.

It may not be otherwise than agreeable to my fair readers to be

informed that the bridegroom now put on a liver-coloured dress coat,

and that he walked to the church with his dress-maker without any dress

cravat, and with no queue in his hair, picturing as he went, to his own

satirical delight, the slanderous glances with which the fair

Kuhschnappelers were following the good stranger girl across the market

to the sacrificial altar of her maiden name. He had said on a previous

occasion, "We ought rather to facilitate than obstruct backbiting, to a

moderate extent, in a married woman, as some slight compensation for

lost flatteries."

The Schulrath Stiefel remained in the bridal chamber, where he sketched

the outlines of a critique on a school-programme at the writing-table.

I see before me, as I write, the lovers kneeling at the altar steps;

and I should like to cast wishes at them (as flowers are thrown),

especially a wish that they may be like the married in Heaven, who,

according to Swedenborg's vision, always merge into one angel--although

on earth, too, they are often fused, by warmth, into one angel, and

that a fallen one--the husband (who is the head of the wife)

representing the butting head of this evil one; this wish, I say, I

would fain cast at them; but my attention, in common with that of all

the wedding company is riveted by an extraordinary circumstance and

puzzling apparition behind the music desks of the choir.

For there appears there, looking down at us--and we all looking up at

it--Siebenkæs's _spirit_, as the popular expression has it, _i.e_. his

body, as it _ought_ to be called. If the bridegroom should look up he

might turn pale, and think he saw himself. We are all wrong; he only

turns red. It was his friend Leibgeber who was standing there, having

many years ago vowed to travel any distance to his marriage, solely

that he might laugh at him for twelve hours' time.

There has seldom been a case of a royal alliance between two peculiar

natures like that between these two. The same contempt for the childish

nonsense held in this life to be noble matter, the same enmity to all

pettiness and perfect indulgence to the little, the same indignation

with dishonourable selfishness, the same delight in laughing in this

lovely madhouse of an earth, the same deafness to the voice of the

multitude, but not to that of honour; these are but some of the first

at hand of the similarities which made of these two but one soul doing

duty in two bodies. And the fact that they were also foster-brothers in

their studies, having for nurses the same branches of knowledge,

including the Law herself, I do not reckon among their chief

resemblances; for it is often the case that the very identity of study

becomes a dissolving decomponent of friendship. Indeed, it was not even

the dissimilarity of their opposite poles which determined their mutual

attraction for each other (Siebenkæs leant towards forgiving, Leibgeber

towards punishing; the former was more a satire of Horace, the latter a

street ballad of Aristophanes with unpoetic as well as poetic

harshnesses). But, as two female friends are fond of being dressed

alike, these two men's souls had put on just the same frock-coat and

morning costume of life; I mean, two bodies of identical fashion,

colour, button-holes, finishings, and cut. Both had the same flash of

the eyes, the same earthy coloured face, the same tallness, leanness,

and everything. And indeed, the Nature freak of counterpart faces is

commoner than we suppose, because we only notice it when some prince or

great person casts a corporeal reflection.

For which reason I very much wish that Leibgeber had not had a slight

limp, so that he might not have been thereby distinguishable from

Siebenkæs, seeing, at least, that the latter had cleverly etched and

dissolved away his own peculiar mark by causing a live toad to breathe

its last above it. For there had been a pyramidal mole near his left

ear, in the shape of a triangle, or of the zodiacal light, or a

turned-up comet's tail, of an ass's ear in short. Partly from

friendship, partly from the enjoyment they had in the scenes of

absurdity which their being confounded with each other gave rise to in

every-day life, they wished to carry the algebraic equation which

existed between them yet a step further, by adopting the same Christian

and surname. But on this point they had a friendly contest, as each

wanted to be the other's namesake, till at length they settled the

difference by _exchanging_ names, thus following the example of the

natives of Otaheite, among whom the lovers exchange names as well as

hearts.

As it is now several years since my hero was thus lightened of his

worthy name by this friendly name-stealer receiving the other worthy

name in exchange, I can't do anything to alter this in my chapters. I

must go on calling him Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkæs as I did at the

beginning, and the other Leibgeber; although it is quite unnecessary

for any reviewer to point out to me that the more comic name of

Siebenkæs would have been better suited to this more humoristic

newcomer, with whom, however, the world shall yet be better acquainted

than I am myself.

When these two counterparts caught sight of one another in the church,

their blushing faces crinkled and curled oddly, at which the looker-on

laughed, until he compared the faces with the eyes, which glowed warm

with the deepest affection. While the wedding-rings were being

exchanged, Leibgeber in the choir took from his pocket a pair of

scissors and a quarto sheet of black paper, and cut out a distant view

of the bride's profile. This cutting out of likenesses he generally

gave out as being his cookshop and bakery upon his perpetual

journeyings; and as it appears that this strange man does not choose to

disclose upon what eminences the waters gather which well up for him

down in the valleys, I am glad to quote (and express my own belief in)

a frequent saying of his regarding his profile cutting--"In the process

of clipping, slices of bread, we know, fall with the cuttings for the

bookbinder, the letter-writer, and the lawyer, when the paper is white;

but in clipping _black_ paper, whether profiles or white mourning

letters with black borders, there fall many more: and if a man is

versed in the liberal art of painting his fellow Christian blacker than

he is--with more members than one--the tongue for instance can do it to

some extent--then Fortune, the Babylonish harlot, will ring that man's

bells (his dinner bell, and his little altar bell), till her arm is

half crippled."

While the deacon was laying his hands on the pair, Leibgeber came down

and stood at the red velvet steps of the altar. And when the ceremony

was over he made, on the occasion of a meeting such as this, after a

separation of some half-a-year or so, the following somewhat lengthy

speech:--

"Good morning, Siebenkæs."

They never said more to each other, though years might have elapsed;

and at the resurrection of the dead, Siebenkæs will answer him, just as

he did to-day,--

"Good morning, Leibgeber."

The twelve hours of banter, however, which friends often find it an

easy matter to threaten each other with in absence, are an

impossibility to the tender heart, keenly enough alive though it may be

to the humorous sides of matters, when it is moved (as in this case) at

the sight of the friend passing into the vestibule of some new

labyrinth of our subterranean existence.

I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I

am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at

Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact

copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have

inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion

of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that

it is neither in my power nor in my pen's to _half_ portray, and that

in a feeble style, how the guests--there were almost as many there as

there were chairs--enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover,

there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom's

guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very

sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive

Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by

his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the

forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be

filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not

even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work

but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted

under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day

before the closing of the gate; how not only was there _one_ course

served up, but a second, a "Doppelgänger." To anyone, indeed, who has

dined at great men's tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if

there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws

of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs

(the hairdresser's wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided

for the first course.

1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could

enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the

crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre

had in the convent--that is to say, merely the tail.

2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of

meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.

3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the

butcher's shop, _sweetly_ treated.

4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed

the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.

5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had

sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.

I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly

sketching for them a little "cookery-piece" of the second course.

1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of

cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four

syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the

table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as

antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in

the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field

with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy's fire, more

fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic

figure consisted of a calf's tongue, which was black, not from arguing,

but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the

stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was

on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world

one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the

three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter;

these three glorified bodies, which, like "the three children," had

come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls,

were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests,

with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird

Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.

This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards

the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly

were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to

which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country

require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every

year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century,

a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:--"This day

was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I

have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25_s_.). That's what I

_call_ banquetting!" But what would the Saxon treasurer have written?

how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in

my very first chapter that a poor's advocate had gone and spent three

gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!

As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which

welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the

guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the

company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the

privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had

been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the

imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no

drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the

right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in

cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath

alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to

himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events,

could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and

empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;--joking with them, and

actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More

than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the

newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry

critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with

his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he

made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of

his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which _he_ had made on a

similar occasion.

Siebenkæs remarked to the company in general that in the upper circles

of society people are much graver, and more tedious, and empty than in

the lower; that in the former, if any party happens to come to an end

without accursed tedium, people talk of it for a whole week, whereas in

the latter everyone contributes so much to the merry picnic of

conversation that the only thing there generally is not enough of, is

beer. "Oh!" he went on, "if everyone of our condition would but think

of it, he would but envy those of a lower; how accurately, in a

figurative sense too, does that old truth hold good, that coarse linen

keeps one much warmer than fine linen, or even silk, just as a wooden

house is easier warmed than a stone one--and the stone one again

doesn't get cool so soon as the wooden in summer--or as coarse brown

flour is much more nourishing than the fine white, as all the doctors

tell us. And I cannot bring myself to believe that ladies in Paris who

wear diamond hairpins, lead half such happy lives as the women there

who get their living by picking up old hairpins out of the street

sweepings; and many a one whose fuel is nothing but dry fir-cones,

gathered by himself as a substitute for fir-fuel" (here the fuel

economising company thought vividly of their own case), "is often quite

as well off on the whole as people who can preserve green cones in

sugar and eat them."

"Friend Parish Advocate," said Leibgeber, "there you hit it! In the

tap-room and the bar-parlour the worst is at the beginning, the blow,

the kick, the angry word come first of all; the pleasure swells with

the reckoning. The reverse is the case in the palace; in a 'palais' for

the 'palais' everybody's enjoyment goes into his mouth at the same

instant; just as the little Aphides on the leaves all lift up their

tail-ends, and squirt out the honey at the same moment,[12] in the

palace it is absorbed with like simultaneousness and sociability.

Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up

ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and

administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a

dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it

to operate by licking it slowly off."

And other similar sayings were spoken. When once any pleasure has

reached a considerable height, its natural tendency is to become

greater. Many of the lower class members of the sitting exercised the

privilege of drink, and of the special inquisition, to say "Thou" to

one another. Even the gentleman in the red plush coat (the Schulrath

was given to wear one in the dog-day holidays) screwed up his lips, and

smiled in a seductive manner, as elderly maiden ladies do in the

presence of elderly single gentlemen, and gave hints that he had got at

home a couple of real Horatian bottles of champagne. "Not sparkling

then, I'm sure?" Leibgeber answered inquiringly. The Schulrath, who

thought the best kind of champagne exactly the worst, replied with some

self-consciousness, "If it isn't sparkling, well and good, I swear I'll

drink every drop of it myself." The bottles appeared. Leibgeber, taking

the first one, carefully filed through its barrier chain, removed the

cork and opened it as if it had been a last will and testament.

What I maintain is, that, even should the two balsam-trees of life,

namely wit and the love of our fellow men, be withered away up to the

very topmost twig, they can still be brought to life by a proper shower

out of the watering pot of these said bottles--in three minutes they

will begin to sprout. As the glad, wild essence, the wine of the silver

foam, touched the heads of the guests, every brain began to seethe and

glow while fair air-castles rose in each amain. Brilliant and many

tinted were the floating bubbles blown and set free by the Schulrath

Stiefel's ideas of all categories, his simple as well as his compound

ideas, his innate ideas, and also his fixed. And can it ever be

forgotten that he ceased to make learned statements, except on the

subject of Lenette's perfections, and that he told Leibgeber in

confidence, that he should really like to marry, not indeed, "the tenth

Muse, or the fourth Grace, or the second Venus--for it was clear who

had got _her_ already but some step-sister goddess, a distant relation

or other of hers." During the whole journey, he said, he had preached

from the coachbox, as from a pulpit, enlarging to the bride on the

subject of the blessedness of the married state, painting it to her in

the brightest colours, and drawing such a lively picture of it, that he

quite longed to enter into it himself: and the bridegroom would have

thanked him if he had seen how gratefully she had looked at him in

return. And, indeed, the bride was a great success, and happy in all

she did that day, and particularly that evening; and what became her

best of all was that on such a high day as this, she waited upon others

more than she let herself be waited upon--that she put on a light

every-day dress--that even at this advanced stage of her own education

she took private lessons in cookery and household matters from her

female guests, who aired their own theories on these subjects--and that

she already began to think about to-morrow. Stiefel, in his inspired

state, ventured upon exploits which were all but impossible. He placed

his left arm under his right, and thus supporting its weight and that

of its plush sleeve, in a horizontal position, snuffed the candle

before the whole company, and did it rather skilfully on the whole;

somewhat like a gardener on a ladder holding out his pruning shears at

arm's length to a high branch and snipping off the whole concern by a

slight movement of his hand at the bottom. He asked Leibgeber plump out

to give him a profile of Lenette, and later on, when he was going away,

he even made an attempt (but this was the only one of his ventures

which failed) to get hold of her hand and kiss it.

At length all the joy-fires of this happy little company burnt down

like their candles, and one by one the rivers of Eden fell away into

the night. The guests and the candles got fewer and fewer; at last

there was only one guest there, Stiefel (for Leibgeber is not a guest),

and one long candle. It is a lovely and touching time when the loud

clamour of a merry company has finally buzzed itself away into silence,

and just one or two, left alone, sit quietly, often sadly, listening to

the faint echoes, as it were, of all the joy. Finally, the Schulrath

struck the last remaining tent of this camp of enjoyment, and departed;

but he would not for a moment suffer that those fingers, which, in

spite of all their efforts, his lips could not touch, should be clasped

about a cold brass candlestick, for the purpose of lighting him

downstairs. So Leibgeber had to do this lighting. The husband and wife,

for the first time, were alone in the darkness, hand in hand.

Oh, hour of beauty! when in every cloud there stood a smiling angel,

dropping flowers instead of rain, may some faint reflection from thee

reach even to this page of mine, and shine on there for ever.

The bridegroom had never yet kissed his bride. He knew, or fancied,

that his face was a clever one, with sharp lines and angles, expressing

energetic, active effort; not a smooth, regular, "handsome" one: and

as, moreover, he always laughed at himself and his own appearance, he

supposed it would strike other persons in the same light. Hence it was

that, although as an every-day matter he rose superior to the eyes and

tongues of a whole street (not even taking the pains mentally to snap

his fingers at them), he never, except in extraordinary moments of

dithyrambics of friendship, had mustered up the courage to kiss his

Leibgeber--let alone Lenette. And now he pressed her hand more closely,

and in a dauntless manner turned his face to hers (for, you see, they

were in the dark, and he couldn't see her); and he wished the staircase

had as many steps as the cathedral tower, so that Leibgeber might be a

long time coming back with the candle. Of a sudden there _danced_ (so

to speak) over his lips a gliding, tremulous kiss, and--then all the

flames of his affection blazed on high, the ashes blown clean away. For

Lenette, innocent as a child, believed it to be the bride's duty to

give this kiss. He put his arms about the frightened giver with the

courage of bashfulness, and glowed upon her lips with his with all the

fire wherewith love, wine and joy had endowed him; but--so strange is

her sex--she turned away her mouth, and let the burning lips touch her

cheek. And there the modest bridegroom contented himself with one long

kiss, giving expression to his rapture only in tears of unutterable

sweetness which fell like glowing naphtha-drops upon Lenette's cheeks,

and thence into her trembling heart. She leant her face further away;

but in her beautiful wonder at his love, she drew him closer to her.

He left her before his darling friend came back. The tell-tale

powder-snow which had fallen on the bridegroom--that butterfly-dust

which the very slightest touch of these white butterflies leaves upon

our fingers (and hence it was a good idea of Pitt's to put a tax on

powder in 1795)--told some of the story, but the eyes of the friend and

the bride, gleaming in happy tears, told him it all. The two friends

looked for some time at each other with embarrassed smiles, and Lenette

looked at the ground. Leibgeber said, "Hem! Hem!" twice over, and at

length, in his perplexity, remarked, "We've had a delightful evening!"

He took up a position behind the bridegroom's chair, to be out of

sight, and laid his hand on his shoulder, and squeezed it right

heartily; but the happy Siebenkæs could restrain himself no longer; he

stood up, resigned the bride's hand, and the two friends, at last,

after the long yearning of the long day, as if celebrating the moment

of their meeting, stood silently embracing, united by angels, with

Heaven all around them. His heart beating higher, the bridegroom would

fain have widened and completed this circle of union, by joining his

bride and his friend in one embrace; but the bride and the friend took

each one side of him, each embracing only him. Then three pure heavens

opened in glory in three pure hearts; and nothing was there but God,

love, and happiness, and the little earthly tear which hangs on all our

joy-flowers, here below.

In this their great joy and bliss, overborne by unwonted emotion, and

feeling almost strange to each other, they had scarce the courage to

look into each other's tearful eyes; and Leibgeber went away in

silence, without a word of parting or good night.

CHAPTER II.

HOME FUN--SUNDRY FORMAL CALLS--THE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE--A LOVE

QUARREL, AND A FEW HARD WORDS--ANTIPATHETIC INK ON THE WALL--

FRIENDSHIP OF THE SATIRISTS--GOVERNMENT OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

There is many a life which is as pleasant to live as to write, and the

material of this one, in particular, which I am engaged in writing, is

as yet always giving out, like rosewood on the turning lathe, a truly

delicious perfume, all over my workshop. Siebenkæs duly arose on the

Wednesday, but not till the Sunday was it his intention to deposit in

the hands of his diligent house goddess--who put a cap on to her

cap-block in the morning before she put one on to herself--the silver

ingots from his guardian's coffer (wrapped in blotting paper), her

palisades of refuge in the siege of this life; for in fact he couldn't

do so any sooner, because his guardian had gone into the country, that

is to say, out of town, till the Saturday night. "I can give you no

notion, old Leibgeber," said Siebenkæs, "what a joy I feel in looking

forward to how this will delight my wife. I'm sure, to give her

pleasure, I could wish it were three thousand dollars. The dear child

has always hitherto had to live from bonnet to bonnet, but how she

_will_ consider herself a woman set up on a sudden for life, when she

finds she can carry out a hundred housekeeping projects, which, I see

as well as possible, she has got in her head already. And then, old

boy, with the money in our hands, we shall begin the keeping of my

silver wedding directly, the moment the evening service is over--there

shall be a good half-florin's worth of beer in every room in the house.

Look here! why shouldn't the dove, or call him the sparrow, of _my_

hymen play out beer on the people as the two-headed eagle in Frankfort

does wine at a coronation?" Leibgeber answered, "The reason he can't

is, that the prey he catches is of quite another brand. The sour wine

(of the Frankfort eagle) is but the grapeskins--the feathers, the wool,

and the hair which eagles always eject."

It would be of no use whatever--because hundreds of Kuhschnappelers

would correct my statement in their local paper, the 'Imperial

News'--if I were to tell a falsehood here (which I should like very

much to do), and assert that the two advocates spent the short week of

their being together with that gravity and propriety which, becoming as

they are to mankind in general, do yet more particularly secure to

scholars and to the learned the respect and consideration of commoner

minds, to say nothing of the Kuhschnappelian intelligences.

Unfortunately I have got to sing to another tune. In the town of

Kuhschnappel, as in all other towns, provincial, or metropolitan, what

Leibgeber was least of all conspicuous for was a proper gravity of

deportment and behaviour. Here, as elsewhere, his first proceeding was

to get an introduction to the club, as a stranger artist, in order that

he might ensconce himself on a sofa, and, without uttering a word or a

syllable to a human being, go to sleep under the noses of the company

of the "Relaxation" as the club was called. "This," he said, "was what

he liked to have the opportunity of doing in all towns where there were

clubs, casinos, museums, musical societies, &c.; because to sleep in

any rational manner at night in one's ordinary quiet bed was a thing

which _he_, at least, found he was seldom able to manage, on account of

the loud battle of ideas which went on in his head, and the firework

trains of processions of pictures all interweaving and whirling in

and out with such a crash and a din that one could hardly see or hear

one's self. Whereas when one lies down upon a club sofa, everything of

this sort quiets itself down, and a universal truce of ideas

establishes itself; the delicious effect of the company all talking at

once--the happily chosen and appropriate words contributed to the

political-and-other-conversation-picnic, of which one distinguishes

nothing but an _ultima_, perhaps, or sometimes only an _antepenultima_;

this alone sings you into a light slumber. But when a more serious

discussion arises, and some point is argued, disputed and discussed in

all its bearings in a universal clamorous shout--your barometer becomes

completely stationary, and you sleep the deep sleep of a flower which

is rocked, but not awakened, by the storm."

One or two towns with which I am acquainted must, I am sure, remember a

stranger who always used to go to sleep in their clubs, and must also

recollect the beaming expression of countenance with which he would

look about him when he got up and took his hat, as much as to say,

"Many thanks for this refreshing rest."

However, I have little to do with Leibgeber's waking or with his

sleeping here in Kuhschnappel; him I may treat with some indulgence,

seeing that he is soon to be off again into the wide world. But it is

anything but a matter of indifference that my young hero, just

established here with his wife, and whose pranks I have undertaken to

give some account of, as well as of the hits he gets in return, should

go and conduct himself just as if his name was Leibgeber; which had

long ceased to be the case, seeing that he had given formal notice to

his guardian that he had changed it to Siebenkæs.

To mention but one prank--was it not a piece of true tomfoolery that,

when the procession of poor scholars, singing for alms about the

streets, were just beginning their usual begging hymn under the windows

of the best religious families on the opposite side of the street, and

just as they had struck their key-note and were going to start off with

their chorus, Leibgeber, to begin with, made his boar-hound "Saufinder"

(he couldn't live without a big dog) look out of window with a

fashionable lady's night-cap on his head? And was it by any means a

soberer proceeding on Siebenkæs's part, that he took lemons and bit

into them before the eyes of the whole singing class, so that all their

teeth begun to water in an instant? The result will answer these

questions for itself. The singers, having Saufinder in his night-cap in

full view, could no more bring their lips together into a singing

position than a man can whistle and laugh at the same instant. At the

same time all their vocal apparatus being completely submerged by the

opening of their glands, every note they attempted to give out had to

wade painfully through water. In short, was this entire ludicrous

interruption of the whole company of street singers not the precise end

aimed at by both the advocates?

But Siebenkæs has only recently come back from college, and being still

half-full of the freedom of university life, may be excused a liberty

or two. And indeed I consider the little exuberances of university

youth to be like the adipose matter, which, according to Reaumur,

Bonnet, and Cuvier, is stored up by the caterpillar for the nourishment

of the future butterfly during its chrysalis state; the liberty of

manhood has to be alimented by that of youth, and if a son of the muse

has not room given him to develop in full freedom, he will never

develop into anything but some office-holder creeping along on all

fours.

Meanwhile the two friends spent the following days--not wholly in a

disorderly manner--in the writing of marriage cards. With these, on

which of course there was nothing but the words, "Mr. Firmian

Stanislaus Siebenkæs, Poor's Advocate, and his wife, _née_ Engelkraut;

with compliments."--with these papers, and with the lady, they were

both to drive about the town on the Saturday, and Leibgeber had to get

down at all the respectable houses and hand in a card, which is by no

means otherwise than a laudable and befitting custom in towns where

people observe the usages of good society. But the two brethren,

Siebenkæs and Leibgeber, appeared to follow these usages of imperial

and rural towns more from satirical motives than anything else,

conforming to them pretty minutely, it is true, but clearly chiefly for

the fun of the thing, each of them playing the part of first low

comedian and of audience at the same time. It would be an insult to the

borough of Kuhschnappel to suppose that, notwithstanding Siebenkæs's

zealous readiness to join in all the processions of the little place,

in and out of churches, to the town hall and the shooting-ground, it

was wholly unobservant of the satisfaction which it afforded him rather

to make fun of some properly ordered cortége, and mar the effect of it

by his unsuitable dress and absurd behaviour, than to be an ornament to

it. And the genuine eagerness with which he tried to get admitted as a

member of the Kuhschnappel shooting-club was ascribed rather to his

love of a joke than to his being the son of a keen sportsman. As for

Leibgeber, he of course has the very devil in him as regards all such

matters; but he is younger than Siebenkæs, and about to set out on his

travels.

So they drove about the town on the Saturday--and where anybody in the

shape of a grandee lived they stopped, left their passengers' tickets

and drove on, without any misbehaviour. Many ladies and gentlemen, it

is true, got the wrong sow by the ear, and confounded the card carrier

with the young husband sitting in the carriage; but the card carrier

maintained his gravity, knowing that fun has its own proper time. The

cards (some of which were glazed) were delivered according to the

directory, firstly to the members of the government, both of the

greater and lesser council--to the seventy members of the greater, and

the thirteen of the lesser council; consequently the judge, the

treasurer, the two finance councillors, the Heimlicher (so to say,

tribune of the people) and the remaining eight ordinary members--these

constituting the said lesser council--each received his card. After

which the carriage drove down lower, and provided the minor government

officials in the various chambers and offices with _their_ cards, such

as the Offices of Woods, of the Game Commissioners, the Office of

Reform (which latter was for the repression of luxury), and the Meat

Tax Commission, which was presided over by a single master butcher, a

very nice old man.

I am much afraid I have made a considerable slip, inasmuch as I have

drawn up no tables relative to the constitution, &c., of this imperial

borough of Kuhschnappel (which is properly a small imperial town,

though it was once a large one) to lay before the learned and

statistical world. However, I can't possibly pull up here in the full

gallop of my chapter, but must wait till we all get to the end of it,

when I can more conveniently open my statistical warehouse.

The wheel of fortune soon began to rattle, and throw up mud; for when

Leibgeber took his eighth part of a placard of Siebenkæs's marriage to

the house of his guardian, the Heimlicher von Blaise, a tall, meagre,

barge-pole of a woman, wrapped up in wimples of calico, the

Heimlicher's wife, received it indeed, and with warmth, but warmth of

the sort with which we generally administer a cudgelling; moreover, she

uttered the following words (calculated to give rise to reflection)--

"My husband is the Heimlicher of this town, and what is more, he's away

from home. He has nothing to do with seven cheeses;[13] he is tutor and

guardian to persons belonging to the highest and noblest families. You

had better be off as fast as you like; you've got hold of the wrong man

here."

"I quite think we have, myself," said Leibgeber.

Siebenkæs, the ward, here tried to pacify his letter or paper carrier

with the woman a little, by suggesting that, like every good dog, she

was but barking at the strangers before fetching and carrying for them:

and when his friend, more anxious than himself, said, "You're quite

sure, are you not, that you took proper legal precautions against any

venomous 'objections' which the guardian might make to paying up your

money, on account of your changing your name?" he assured him, that

before he had established himself as Siebenkæs, he had procured his

guardian's opinion and approval in writing, which he would show him

when they got home.

But when they did get home, Von Blaise's letter was nowhere to be

found--it wasn't in any of the boxes, nor in any of the college

note-books, nor even among the wastepaper--in fact, there was nothing

of the kind.

"But what a donkey I am to bother about it!" cried Siebenkæs, "what do

I require it for, at all?"

Here Leibgeber, who had been glancing at the Saturday newspapers,

suddenly shoved them into his pocket, and said in a somewhat unwonted

tone of voice, "Come out, old boy, and let's have a run in the fields."

When they got there, he put into his hands the 'Schaffhausen News,' the

'Swabian Mercury,' the 'Stuttgart Times,' and the 'Erlangen Gazette,'

and said, "These will enable you to form some idea of the sort of

scoundrel you have for a guardian."

In each of these newspapers, the following notification appeared:--

"Whereas, Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, now in his 29th year, proceeded to

the University of Leipzig in 1774, but since that date has not been

heard of: now the said Hoseas Heinrich Leibgeber, is hereby, at the

instance of his cousin, Herr Heimlicher von Blaise, edictally cited and

summoned by himself or the lawful heirs of his body, within six months

from the date of these presents (whereof two months are hereby

constituted the first term, two months the second, and two months the

third and peremptory term), to appear within the Inheritance Office of

this borough, and, on satisfactory proof of identity, to receive over

the sum of 1200 Rhenish gulden deposited in the hands of the said

Heimlicher von Blaise as trustee and guardian; _which failing_, that,

as directed by the decree of council of 24th July 1655 (which enacts,

that any person who shall be for ten years absent from the realm, shall

be taken _pro mortuo_), the above-named sum of 1200 Rhenish florins may

be made over and paid to his said guardian and trustee, the aforesaid

Heimlicher von Blaise. Dated at Kuhschnappel in Swabia, the 20th

August, 1785.

"Inheritance Office of the free Imperial

Borough of Kuhschnappel."

It is unnecessary to remind the legal reader that the decree of council

referred to is not in accordance with the legal usage of Bohemia, where

thirty-one years is the stipulated period, but with that which formerly

prevailed in France, when ten years were sufficient. And when the

advocate came to the end of the notice, and stared, motionless, at its

concluding lines, his soul's brother took hold of his hand, and cried,

"Alas! alas! it is I who am to blame for all this, for changing names

with you."

"You?--oh, you? The devil alone, and nobody else. But I must find that

letter," he said, and they made another search all over the house, in

every corner where a letter could be. After an hour of this Leibgeber

hunted out one with a broken seal of the guardian, of which the thick

paper, and the broad legal fold, without an envelope, told

unmistakeably that it had been addressed neither by a lady, a merchant,

nor courtier, but by the quill of a bird of quite a different tribe.

However, there was nothing _in_ this letter, except Siebenkæs's name in

Siebenkæs's own writing--not another word, outside or inside. Quite

natural; for the advocate had a bad habit of trying his hand and his

pen on the backs of letters, and writing his own name and other

people's as well, with flourishes about them.

The letter _had_ once been written in the inside, but, to save an

incredible waste of good paper, the Heimlicher von Blaise had written

his concurrence in the exchange of the names with an ink which vanishes

from the paper of itself, and leaves it, _in integrum_, white as it was

before it was written on.

I may, perhaps, be doing a chance service to many persons of the better

classes, who nowadays more than ever have occasion to write promissory

notes and other business documents, if I here copy out for them the

receipt for this ink which vanishes after it is dry; I take it from a

reliable source. Let the man of rank scrape off the surface from a

piece of fine black cloth, such as he wears at court--grind the

scrapings finer still on a piece of marble--moisten this fine cloth

dust repeatedly with water, then make his ink with this, and write his

promissory note with it; he will find that, as soon as the moisture has

evaporated, every letter of the promissory note has flown away with it

in the form of dust; the white star will have shone out, as it were,

through the blackness of the ink.

But I consider that I am doing an equal service to the holders and

presenters of such promissory notes as to the drawers of them, inasmuch

as, for the future, they will be careful not to be satisfied with a

security of this description, till they have exposed it for some time

to the sun.

Some time ago, I should have here been apt to confound this cloth ink

with the _sympathetic_ ink (likewise possessing the property of turning

pale and disappearing after a time), which is commonly made use of in

both the preliminary and final treaties entered into between royal

persons; the latter however, has a _red_ tint. A treaty of peace of

three years' standing is no longer legible to a man in the prime of

life, because the _red_ ink--the _encaustum_, with which formerly no

one but the Roman emperors might write--is too apt to turn _pale_,

unless a sufficient number of human beings (from whom, as from the

cochineal insect, this dye stuff is prepared) have been made use of in

its manufacture; and this (from motives of sordid parsimony) is not

always the case. So that the treaty has frequently to be engraved and

etched into the territory afresh with good instruments--the so-called

"instruments of peace"--at the point of the bayonet.

The two friends kept the happy young wife in ignorance of this first

thunderclap of the storm which was threatening her married life. On the

Sunday morning they went to make a friendly call on the Heimlicher

during the church service; unfortunately he was at church, however.

They postponed their entertaining visit till the afternoon; but then he

himself was paying one to the chapel of the orphan asylum, the whole

blooming body of the orphans, boys and girls, having previously made

one to him, to enjoy the privilege of kissing his hand in his capacity

of superintendent of the orphan asylum; for the inspectorship of that

institution was, as he modestly but truly observed, entrusted to his

unworthy hands. After the evening sermon, he had to perform a service

of his own in his own house, in short, he was fenced off from the two

advocates by a triple row of spiritual altar rails. It was his

admirable custom to permit the members of his household, not indeed to

eat, but to pray at the same table with him. He thought it well to

spend the Sunday as a day of labour in psalm-singing with them,

because, by such devotional exercises, he best preserved them from sins

of Sabbath breaking, such as working on _their own_ account, at sewing,

mending, &c. And, on the whole, he thought it well to make of the

Sunday in this manner a day of preparation for the coming week, just as

actors in places where Sunday representations are not allowed, have

their rehearsals on that day.

However, I recommend people in delicate health not to go near or smell

at this sort of beautiful sky-blue plants which grow in the Church's

vineyard only to be looked at, as an English garden is adorned with the

pretty aconite and its sky- or Jesuit's-blue _poisonous_ flowers, which

grow pyramidally to man's height.[14] People like Von Blaise, not only

ascend Mount Sinai and the Golgotha, that, like goats, they may feed as

they climb; but they occupy these sacred heights for the purpose of

making attacks and incursions from them, just as good generals take

possession of the hills, and particularly the _gallows-hills_. The

Heimlicher mounts from earth to the heavens oftener than Blanchard

does, and with similar motives, indeed, he can keep his soul on the

wing in these elevated regions for half a day at a time, in which

respect, however, he does not quite equal the King of Siam's dragon

kites which the mandarins, by relieving each other at the task, manage

to keep up in the sky for a couple of months at a time. He soars, not

as the lark does, to make music, but as the noble falcon does, to swoop

down upon something or other. If you see him praying on a Mount of

Olives, be sure that he's going to build an oil mill on it; and if he

weeps by a brook Kedron, depend upon it he's either going a-fishing in

it, or else thinking of pitching somebody into it. He prays with the

object of luring to him the _ignes-fatui_ of sins; he kneels, but only

as a front rank does, to deliver its fire at the foe before it; he

opens his arms as with warm benevolent affection, to fold home one, a

ward say, in their embrace, but only in the manner of the red-hot

Moloch, that he may burn him to cinders; or he folds his arms piously

together, but does it as the machines called "maidens" did, only to cut

people to pieces.

At last the friends, in their anxiety, came to see that there are some

people whom one can only manage to get access to when one comes as

thieves do, unannounced so at 8 o'clock on the Sunday evening they

walked, _sans façon_, into Von Blaise's house. Everything was still and

empty; they went through an empty hall into an empty drawing-room, the

half-open folding doors of which led into the household chapel. All

they could see through the crevice was six chairs, an open hymn-book

lying on its face on each of them, and a table with wax-cloth cover, on

which were Miller's 'Heavenly Kiss of the Soul,' and Schlichthoher's

'Five-fold Dispositions for all Sundays and Feasts of the Church.' They

pressed through the gap, and lo and behold! there was the Heimlicher

all alone, continuing his devotions in his sleep, with his cap under

his arm. His house- and church-servants had read to him till sleep had

stiffened him to a petrifaction, or pillar of salt (an event which

occurred every Sunday), for his eyes and his head were alike heavy with

the edible, the potable, and the spiritual, refreshment of which he had

partaken; or because he was like many who think it well to close their

eyes during the sowing of the heavenly seed, just as people do when

their heads are being powdered, or because churches and private chapels

are still like those ancient temples in which the communications of the

oracles were received during sleep. And as soon as they saw his eyes

closed, the servants would read more and more softly, to accustom him

gradually to the complete cessation of the sound; and, by and by, the

devout domestics would steal gently away, leaving him in his attitude

of prayer till 10 o'clock; at that hour (when, moreover, Madame von

Blaise generally came home from paying visits) the domestic sacristan

and night watchman would rouse him from his sleep with a shrill "Amen,"

and he would put something on to his bald head again.

This evening matters fell out differently. Leibgeber rapped loudly on

the table two or three times with the knuckle of his forefinger to wake

the city's father out of his first sleep. When he opened his eyes and

saw before him the two lean parodies and copies of one another, he

took, in his beer- and sleep-heaviness of idea, a glass periwig from

off a block, and put that on his head instead of his cap, which had

fallen down. His ward addressed him politely, saying he wished to

present to him his friend with whom he had made the exchange of names.

He likewise called him his "kind cousin and guardian." Leibgeber, more

angry and less self-contained, because he was younger, and because the

wrong had not been done to _him_, fired into the Heimlicher's ears,

from a position closer to him by three discourteous paces, the

inquiries, "Which of us two is it that your worship has given out _pro

mortuo_, that you may be able to cite him as a dead man? There are the

ghosts of _two_ of us here both together." Blaise turned with a lofty

air from Leibgeber to Siebenkæs, and said, "If you have not changed

your dress, sir, as well as your name, I believe _you_ are the

gentleman whom I have had the honour of talking with on several

previous occasions. Or was it _you_, sir?" he said to Leibgeber, who

shook like one possessed. "Well," he continued in a more pleasant tone,

"I must confess to you, Mr. Siebenkæs, that I had always supposed,

until now, that you were the person who left this for the university

ten years ago, and whose little inheritance I then assumed the

guardianship or curatorship of. What probably chiefly contributed to my

mistake, if it be a mistake, was, I presume, the likeness which,

_præter propter_, you certainly seem to bear to my missing ward; for in

many details you undoubtedly differ from him; for instance, he had a

mole beside his ear."

"The infernal mole," interrupted Leibgeber, "was obliterated by means

of a toad, on my account entirely, because it was like an ass's ear,

and he never thought that, when he lost his ear, he should lose a

relative along with it."

"That may be," said the guardian coldly, "You must prove to me, Herr

Advocate, that it was to YOU I had been thinking of paying over the

inheritance to-day; for your announcement that you had exchanged your

family name for that of an utter stranger I considered to be probably

one of the jokes for which you are so celebrated. But I learned last

week that you had been proclaimed in church and married in the name of

Siebenkæs, and more to the same effect. I then discussed the question

with Herr Grossweibel (the President of the Chamber of Inheritance),

and with my son-in-law, Herr von Knärnschilder, and they assured me I

should be acting contrary to my duty and safety if I let this property

out of my hands. What would you do--they very properly said--what

answer would you have to make if the real owner of the name were to

appear and demand another settlement of the guardianship accounts? It

would be too bad, truly, for a man, who, besides his manifold business

of other kinds, undertook this troublesome guardian work, which the law

does not require him to do, purely from affection for his relative, and

from the love which he bears to all his brethren of mankind[15]--it

would be too bad, I say, for him to have to pay up this money a second

time out of his own pocket. At the same time, Mr. Siebenkæs, as, in my

capacity of a private individual, I am more disposed to admit the

validity of your claim than you perhaps suppose, you being a lawyer,

know quite as well as I that my individual conviction carries with it

no legal weight whatever, and that I have to deal with this matter not

as a man, but as a guardian--it would probably be the best course to

let some third party less biassed in my favour, such as the Inheritance

Office, decide the question. Let me have the satisfaction, Mr.

Siebenkæs, as soon as it may be possible" (he ended more smilingly, and

laying his hand on the other's shoulder) "to see that which I hope may

prove the case, namely, that you are my long-missing cousin, Leibgeber,

properly established by legal proof."

"Then," said Leibgeber, grimly calm, and with all kinds of

scale-passages and fugatos coursing over the colour-piano of his face,

"is the little bit of resemblance which Mr. Siebenkæs there has to--to

_himself_, that is to say, to your worship's ward, to be taken as

proving nothing; not even as much as an equal similarity in a case of

_comparatio literarum_ would prove?"

"Oh, of course," said Blasius, "something, certainly, but not

everything; for there were several false Neros, and three or four sham

Sebastians in Portugal; suppose, now, _you_ should be my cousin

yourself, Mr. Leibgeber!"

Leibgeber jumped up at once, and said in an altered and joyful voice,

"So I am, my dearest guardian--it was all done to try you--I hope you

will pardon my friend his share in the little mystification."

"All very well," answered Blasius, more inflatedly, "but your own

changes of ground must show you the necessity for a proper legal

investigation."

This was more than Siebenkæs could endure, he squeezed his friend by

the hand, as much as to say, "Pray be patient," and inquired in a voice

which an unwonted feeling of hatred rendered faint, "Did you never

write to me when I was in Leipzig?"--"If you are my ward, I certainly

did, many times; if you are not, you have got hold of my letters in

some other way."

Then Siebenkæs asked, more faintly still, "Have you no recollection at

all of a letter in which you assured me there was not the slightest

risk involved in my proposed change of name, none whatever?"

"This is really quite ludicrous," answered Blaise, "in that case there

could be no question about the matter!"

Here Leibgeber clasped the father of the city with his two fingers as

if they had been iron rivets, grasped his shoulders as one does the

pommel of a saddle at mounting, clamped him firmly into his chair, and

thundered out, "You never wrote anything of the kind, did you? you

smooth-tongued, grey-headed old scoundrel! Stop your grunting, or I'll

throttle you! never wrote the letter, eh? keep quiet--if you lift a

finger, my dog will tear your windpipe out. Answer me quietly you say

you never received any letter on the subject, do you?"

"I had rather say nothing," whispered Blasius, "evidence given under

coercion is valueless."

Here Siebenkæs drew his friend away from the Heimlicher, but Leibgeber

said to the dog, "Mordax! hooy, Sau.," took the glass periwig from the

head of the servant of the state, broke off the principal curls of it,

and said to Siebenkæs (Saufinder lay ready to spring), "Screw him down

yourself, if the dog is not to do it, that he may listen to me. I want

to say one or two pretty things to him--don't let him say 'Pap!'--Herr

Heimlicher von Blasius, I have not the slightest intention of making

use of libellous or abusive language to you, or of spouting an

improvised pasquinade; I merely tell you, that you are an old rascal, a

robber of orphans, a varnished villain, and everything else of the

kind--for instance, a Polish bear, whose footmarks are just like a

human being's.[16] The epithets which I here make use of, such as

scoundrel--Judas--gallows-bird" (at each word he struck the glass

turban like a cymbal against his other hand), "skunk, leech,

horse-leech--nominal definitions such as these are not abuse, and do not

constitute libel, firstly because, according to 'L. § de injur.,' the

grossest abuse may be uttered in jest, and I am in jest here--and

we may always make use of abusive language in maintaining our own

rights--see 'Leyser.'[17] Indeed, according to Quistorp's 'Penal Code,'

we may accuse a person of the gravest crimes without _animus

injurandi_, provided that he has not been already tried and punished

for them. And has your honesty ever been put on its trial and punished,

you cheating old grey-headed vagabond? I suppose you are like the

Heimlicher in Freyburg[18]--rather a different sort of man to you, it's

to be hoped--and have half-a-dozen years or so, during which no one can

lay hold of you--but I've got hold of you to-day, hypocrite! Mordax!"

The dog looked up at this word of command.

"Let him go, now," Siebenkæs begged, compassionating the prostrate

sinner.

"In a moment; but don't you put me in a fury, please," said Leibgeber,

letting fall the plucked wig, standing on it, and taking out his

scissors and black paper, "I want to be quite calm while I clip out a

likeness of the padded countenance of this portentous cotton-nightcap

of a creature, because I shall take it away with me as a _gage

d'amour_. I want to carry this _ecce homunculus_ about with me half

over the world, and say to everybody, 'Hit it, bang away at it well;

blessed is he who doth not depart this life till he hath thrashed

Heimlicher Blasius of Kuhschnappel; I would have done it myself if I

had not been far too strong.'

"I shan't be able," he went on, turning to Siebenkæs, and finishing a

good portrait, "to give that sneak and sharper there an account by word

of mouth of my success, for a whole year to come; but by that time the

one or two little touches of abuse which I have just lightly applied to

him will be covered by the statute of limitations, and we shall be as

good friends as ever again."

Here he unexpectedly requested Siebenkæs to stay by Saufinder--whom he

had constituted into a corps of observation by a motion of his

finger--as he was obliged to leave the room for a moment. On the last

occasion of his being in Blaise's grand drawing-room (where he

displayed his magnificence before the Kuhschnappel world, great and

small), he had noticed the paper-hangings there, and an exceedingly

ingenious stove, in the form of the goddess of justice, Themis, who

does, indeed, singe as frequently as she merely warms. And this time he

had brought with him a camel's-hair pencil, and a bottle of an ink made

from cobalt dissolved in aquafortis, with a little muriatic acid

dropped into it. Unlike the black cloth ink, which is visible at first

and disappears afterwards, the sympathetic ink here spoken of is

invisible at first, and only comes out a green colour on the paper when

it is warmed. Leibgeber now wrote with his camel's-hair pencil and this

ink the following invisible notification on the paper which was closest

to the stove, or Themis.

"The Goddess of Justice hereby protests in presence of this assembly

against being thus set up in effigy, and warmed and cooled (if not

absolutely hanged), at the pleasure of the Heimlicher von Blaise, who

is long since condemned at her inner secret tribunal.

"THEMIS."

Leibgeber came away, leaving the silent seed of this Priestley's green

composition behind him on the wall with the pleasing certainty that

next winter, some evening when the drawing-room was nicely warmed by

the goddess for a party, the whole dormant green crop would all of a

sudden shoot lustily forth.

So he came back to the oratory again, finding Saufinder keeping up his

appointed official contemplation, and his friend maintaining his

observation of the dog. They then all took a most polite leave, and

even begged the Heimlicher not to come into the street with them, as it

mightn't be so easy to keep Mordax from a bite or so there.

When they got to the street Leibgeber said to his friend, "Don't pull

such a long face about it--I shall keep flying backwards and forwards

to you, of course. Come through the gate with me--I must get across the

frontier of this country; let's run, and get on to royal territory

before six minutes are over our heads."

When they had passed the gate, that is to say, the un-Palmyra-like

ruins of it, the crystal reflecting grotto of the August night stood

open and shining above the dark-green earth, and the ocean-calm of

nature stayed the wild storm of the human heart. Night was drawing and

closing her curtain (a sky full of silent suns, not a breath of breeze

moving in it), up above the world and down beneath it; the reaped corn

stood in the sheaves without a rustle. The cricket with his one

constant song, and a poor old man gathering snails for the snail-pits,

seemed to be the only things that dwelt in the far reaching darkness.

The fires of anger had suddenly gone out in the two friends' hearts.

Leibgeber said, in a voice pitched two octaves lower, "God be thanked!

this writes a verse of peace round the storm bell within! the night

seems to me to have muffled my alarum drum with her black robe, and

softened it down to a funeral march. I am delighted to find myself

growing a little sad after all that anger and shouting."

"If it only hadn't all been on my account, old Henry," said Siebenkæs,

"your humorous fury at that barefaced old sinner."

"Though you are not so apt to shy your satire into people's faces as I

am," said Leibgeber, "you would have been in a greater rage if you had

been in my place. One can bear injustice to one's self--particularly

when one has as good a temper as I have--but not to a friend. And

unluckily you are the martyr to my name to-day, and eyewitness and

blood-witness into the bargain. Besides, I should tell you that, as a

general rule, when once I am ridden by the devil of anger--or rather

when I have got on to _his_ back--I always spur the brute nearly to

death, till he falls down, so that I mayn't have to mount him again for

the next three months. However, I have poured _you_ out a nice basin of

black broth, and left you sitting with the spoon in your hand."

Siebenkæs had been dreading for some time that he would say something

about the 1200 gulden, those baptismal dues of his re-baptism, the

discount of his name. He therefore said, as cheerfully and pleasantly

as his heart, torn by this sudden, nocturnal parting, would let him,

"My wife and I have plenty of supplies in our little bit of a fortress

of Konigstein, and we can sow and reap there too. Heaven only grant

that we may have many a hard nut to crack; they give a delicious

flavour to the table-wine of our stale, flat, everyday life. I shall

bring my action to-morrow."

They both concealed their emotion at the approach of the moment of

parting under the cloak of comic speeches. These two counterparts came

to a column which had been erected by the Princess of ---- on the spot

where, on her return from England, she had met her sister coming from

the Alps; and as this joyful souvenir of a meeting had a quite opposite

significance to-night, Leibgeber said, "Now, right about face--march!

Your wife is getting anxious--it's past eleven o'clock. There, you

see, we have reached your boundary mark, your frontier fortress,

the gallows. I am off at once into Bayreuth and Saxony to cut my

crop--other people's faces, to wit, and sometimes my own fool's face

into the bargain. I shall most likely come and see you again, just for

the fun of the thing, in a year and a day, when the verbal libels are

pretty well out of date. By the by." he added, hastily, "promise me on

your word of honour to do me one little favour."

Siebenkæs instantly did so. "Don't send my deposit after me[19]--a

plaintiff has payments to make. So fare you well, dearest old man," he

blurted huskily out, and after a hurried kiss, ran quickly down the

little hill with an air of assumed unconcern. His friend, bewildered

and forsaken, looked after the runner, without uttering a syllable.

When he got to the bottom of the hillock, the runner stopped, bent his

head low towards the ground, and--loosened his garters.

"Couldn't you have done that up here?" cried Siebenkæs, and went down

to him, and said, "We'll go as far as the gallows hill together." The

sand-bath and reverberating furnace of a noble anger made all their

emotions warmer to-day, just as a hot climate gives strength to poisons

and spices. As the _first_ parting had caused their eyes to overflow,

they had nothing more to keep in control but voice and language.

"Are you sure you feel quite well after being so much vexed?" said

Siebenkæs. "If the death of domestic animals portends the death of the

master of the house, as the superstition runs," said Leibgeber, "I

shall live to all eternity, for my menagerie[20] of beasts is all alive

and kicking." At last they stopped at the market house, beside the

place of execution. "Just up to the top," said Siebenkæs, "no further."

When they came to the top of this boundary-hill of so many an unhappy

life--and when Siebenkæs looked down upon the green spotted stone altar

where so many an innocent sacrifice had been offered up, and thought,

in that dark minute, of the heavy blood drops of agony, the burning

tears which women who had killed their children[21] (and were

themselves put to death by the state and their lovers) had let fall

upon this their last and briefest rack of torture here in this field of

blood--and as he gazed from this cloudbank of life out over the broad

earth with the mists of night steaming up round its horizons and over

all its streams--he took his friend's hand, and, looking to the free

starry heaven, said, "The mists of our life on earth _must_ be resolved

into stars, up there at last, as the mists of the milky way part into

suns. Henry, don't you yet believe in the soul's immortality?"--"It

will _not_ do yet, I can _not_," Leibgeber replied. "Blasius, now,

hardly deserves to live _once_, let alone twice or several times. I

sometimes can't help feeling as if a little piece of the other world

had been _painted on_ to this, just to finish it off and make it

complete, as I've sometimes seen subsidiary subjects introduced in

fainter colours towards the edge of a picture, to make the principal

subject stand out from the frame, and to give it unity of effect. But

at this moment, human beings strike me as being like those crabs which

priests used to fasten tapers to and set them crawling about

churchyards, telling the people they were the souls of the departed.

Just so do we, in a masquerade impersonation of immortal beings, crawl

about over graves with our tapers of souls. Ten to one they go out at

last."

His friend fell on his heart, and said with vivid conviction, "We do

_not_ go out! Farewell a thousand times. We shall meet where there is

no parting. By my soul! we do _not_ go out. Farewell, farewell."

And so they parted. Henry passed slowly and with drooping arms through

the footpaths between the stubble-fields, raising neither hand nor eye,

that he might give no sign of sorrow. But a deep grief fell on

Siebenkæs, for men who rarely shed tears shed all the more when they do

weep. So he went to his house and laid his weary melting heart to rest

on his wife's untroubled breast (there was not even a dream stirring

it). But far on into the forecourt of the world of dreams did the

thought of the days in store for Lenette attend him--and of his

friend's night journey under the stars, which he would be looking up at

without any hope of ever being nearer to them; and it was chiefly for

his friend that his tears flowed fast.

Oh ye two friends--thou who art out in the darkness there, and thou who

art here at home! But wherefore should I be continually harping back

upon the old emotion which you have once more awakened in me--the same

which in old days used to penetrate and refresh me so when I read as a

lad about the friendship of a Swift, an Arbuthnott and a Pope in their

letters? Many another heart must have been fired and aroused as mine

was at the contemplation of the touching, calm affection which the

hearts of these men felt for one another; cold, sharp, and cutting to

the outer world, in the inner land which was common to them they could

work and beat for each other; like lofty palm trees, presenting long

sharp spines towards the common world below them, but at their summits

full of the precious palm-wine of strong friendship.

So, in their lesser degree, I think we may find something of a similar

kind to like and to admire in our two friends, Leibgeber and Siebenkæs.

We need not inquire very closely into the causes which brought about

their friendship; for it is hate, not love, which needs to be explained

and accounted for. The sources whence everything that is good wells

forth from this universe upwards to God himself, are veiled by a night

all thick with stars; but the stars are very far away.

These two men, while as yet in the fresh, green springtime of

university life, at once saw straight through each other's breasts into

each other's hearts, and they attracted each other with their opposite

poles. What chiefly delighted Siebenkæs was Leibgeber's firmness and

power, and even his capability of anger, as well as his flights and

laughter over every kind of sham grandeur, sham fine feeling, sham

scholarship. Like the condor, he laid the eggs (of his act or of his

pregnant saying) in no nest, but on the bare rock, preferring to live

without a name, and consequently always taking some other than his own.

On which account the poor's advocate used to tell him, ten times over,

the two following anecdotes, just to enjoy his irritation at them.

The first was, that a German professor in Dorpat, who was delivering a

eulogistic address on the subject of the reigning grand duke Alexander,

suddenly stopped in the middle of it, and gazed for a long time in

silence on a bust of that potentate, saying at length, "The speechless

heart has spoken."

The second was that Klopstock sent finely got-up copies of his

'Messiah' to schoolporters, with the request that the most deserving

among them might scatter spring-flowers on the grave of his own old

teacher, Stubel, while softly pronouncing his (Klopstock's) name. To

which, if Leibgeber had anything to adduce on the subject, Siebenkæs

would go on to add that the poet had called up four new porters to give

them three readings apiece from his 'Messiah,' rewarding each with a

gold medal provided by a friend. After telling him this he would look

to see Leibgeber's foaming and stamping at a person's thus worshipping

himself as a species of reliquary full of old fingers and bones.

What Leibgeber, on the other hand,--more like the Morlacks, who, as

Towinson and Forlis tell us, though they have but one word to express

both revenge and sanctification (osveta), do yet have their friends

betrothed to them with a blessing at the altar--chiefly delighted in

and loved about his satirical foster-brother was the diamond brooch

which in his case pinned together poetry, kindly temper, and a stoicism

which scorned this world's absurdities. And lastly, each of them daily

enjoyed the gratification of knowing that the other understood him

completely and wonderfully, whether he were in jest or in earnest. But

it is not every friend who meets with another of this stamp.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER II.

GOVERNMENT OF THE IMPERIAL MARKET BOROUGH OF KUHSCHNAPPEL.

I have omitted, all through two chapters, to state that the free

imperial borough of Kuhschnappel (of which, it appears, there is a

namesake in the Erzgebirge country) is the thirty-second of the Swabian

towns which takes its seat on Swabia's town-bench of thirty-one towns.

Swabia may look upon herself as being a hotbed and forcing-house of

imperial towns, these colonies, or hostelries, of the goddess of

freedom in Germany, whom persons of position worship as their household

goddess; and according to whose "election of grace" it is that poor

sinners are called to salvation. I must now, in this place, accede to

the universally expressed desire for an accurate sketch map of the

Kuhschnappel Government; though few readers, save people such as

Nikolai, Schlæzer and the like, can be expected to form an idea of the

difficulty I have experienced, and the sum I have had to expend in

postage, before getting hold of information somewhat more accurate than

that which is generally current on the subject of Kuhschnappel. Indeed,

imperial towns, like Swiss towns, always plaster over and stop up the

combs where their honey is stored, as though their constitutions were

stolen silver plate with the owner's name still unobliterated--or as

though the little bits of towns and territories were fortresses (which

indeed they are as against their own inhabitants more than against

their enemies), of which strangers are not allowed to take sketches.

The constitution of our noteworthy borough of Kuhschnappel seems to

have been the original rough draft or sketch which Bern (a place at no

great distance) has copied hers from, only with the pantograph on a

larger scale. For Bern, like Kuhschnappel, has her Upper House, or

supreme council, which decides upon peace and war, and has the power of

life and death just as in Kuhschnappel, and consists of chief

magistrates, treasurers, Venners, Heimlichers and counsellors, only

that there are more of them in Bern than in Kuhschnappel. Further, Bern

has her Lower House, consisting of presidents, deputies and pensioners,

subsidiary to the Upper. The two Chambers of Appeal, those of Woods and

Forests, Game Laws, and Reform, the Meat Tax and other commissions are

clearly but large text copies of the Kuhschnappel outlines.

To speak the truth, however, I have drawn this comparison between these

two places solely with the view of being comprehensible (perhaps at the

same time agreeable) to the Swiss generally, and particularly to the

people of Bern. For in reality, Kuhschnappel rejoices in a much more

perfect and aristocratic constitution than Bern, such as was to be

found in a measure in Ulm and Nürnberg, though the stormy weather of

the revolution has rather kept them back than brought them forward. A

short time since, Nürnberg and Ulm were as fortunate as Kuhschnappel is

now, inasmuch as they were governed, not by the common, working

classes, but by people of family only, so that no mere citizen could

meddle with the matter in the least degree either in person or by

deputy. Now, unfortunately, it appears to be the case in both towns

that the cask of the state has had to be fresh tapped just about an

inch or so above the thick dregs of the common herd, because what came

from the tap _nearer the top_ proved sour. However, it is impossible

for me to go on until I have cleared out of the way a much too

prevalent error respecting large towns.

The Behemoths and Condors among towns--Petersburg, London,

Vienna--might, if they chose, establish universal equality of liberty

and liberty of equality; very few statisticians have been struck by

this idea, although it is so very clear. For a capital which it takes

two hours and a quarter to go round is, as it were, an Ætna-crater of

equivalent circumference for an entire country, and benefits the

neighbourhood of it as the volcano does, not only by what it _ejects_

(its eruptive matter), but by what it swallows up. It clears

the country in the first place of villages, and next of country

towns--which are primarily the outhouses and office-buildings of

capital cities--inasmuch as it pushes itself outwards in all directions

year by year, and gets grown over, fringed round, and walled about with

the villages. London, we know, has converted the neighbouring villages

into streets of itself; but in the lapse of centuries the long,

constantly extending arms of all great towns must enfold not only the

villages, but also the country towns, converting them into suburbs.

Now, in this process, the roads, fields and meadows which lie between

the giant city and the villages get covered over like a river-bed with

a deposit of stone-paving; and consequently the operations of

agriculture can no longer be carried on otherwise than in flower-pots

in the windows. Where there is no agriculture, I cannot see what the

agricultural population can become but unemployed idlers, such as no

state allows within its boundaries; and, prevention being better than

cure, the state will have to clear this agricultural population out of

the way before it sinks into this condition of idling, either by means

of letters inhibitory directed against the increase of population, or

by extermination, or by ennobling them into soldiery and domestics. In

a village which has undergone this process of being morticed into a

town like a lump of rubble,--or converted into a stave of the great tun

of Heidelberg in this manner--any country people that might be still to

the fore, would be as ludicrous as useless; the coral cells of the

villages must be cleared out before they attain the dignity of becoming

reefs or atolls of a town.

When this is done, the hardest step towards equality has, no doubt,

been taken; the people of the country towns, a class the most hostile

of all classes, at heart, to equality--have next to be attacked and, if

possible, exterminated by the great town; this, however, is more a

matter of time than of good management. At the same time, what one or

two residency-towns have accomplished in this direction, is a good

beginning at all events. Could we attain to our ideal, however--could

we live to see the day when the two classes who are the most formidable

opponents of equality--the peasants, and the people of the smaller

towns--should have disappeared; and when not only the agricultural

races but the lower nobility, the small proprietors, should be

extinct--ah! then the world would be in the blissful enjoyment of an

equality of a nobler sort than that which obtained in France, where it

was merely a _plebeian_ one. There would be an absolute equality if

pure nobility and collective humanity could rejoice in the possession

of _one_ patent of nobility, and of real authentic _ancestors_. In

Paris, the revolution wrote (as people did in the most ancient times)

without capital letters; but if my golden age came to pass, the writing

would be as it was in somewhat _later_ times than those just alluded

to, _all_ capital letters, not, as at present, with capitals sticking

up like steeples among quantities of small letters. But though such a

lofty style, such an ennoblement of humanity as this may be nothing but

a beautiful dream, and though we must be content with the minor

consolation of seeing, in towns, the middle classes restricted to a

single street, as is now the case with the Jews; even that would be a

clear gain to the intellectual portion of mankind in the eyes of anyone

who considers what an accomplished, capable set of people the higher

nobility are.

It is upon the smaller towns, however, that we can more confidently

rely than upon the great residency-towns, for aid in bringing about the

nobilisation of the collective human race, and this brings me back to

Kuhschnappel. People really seem to forget that it is too much to

expect that the four square versts or so which a residency-town

occupies shall be able to dominate, swallow up, and convert into

portions of itself, more than a thousand square miles of the

surrounding country (just as the boa-constrictor swallows animals

bigger than itself). London has not much above 600,000 inhabitants;

what a miserably small force compared to the 5½ millions of all

England, which that city has to contend with, and cut off the wings,

and supplies of, alone and unassisted--to say nothing of Scotland and

Ireland! This, however, does not apply to provincial towns; here the

number of villages, villagers, and burghers which have to be coerced,

starved, and put to rout, are in a fair proportion to the size of the

town, the numbers of the aristocracy or governing classes, who have to

execute the task, and work the smoothing plane which is to level the

surface of humanity. Here there is little difficulty in _precipitating_

the citizens (as if they were a kind of coarse dregs swimming in the

clear fluid of nobility); and when this precipitation is not

successfully accomplished, it is the aristocracy themselves who are to

blame, in that they often show mercy in the wrong place, and look upon

the Burgher-bank as a grassbank, the grass of which is, it is true,

grown only to be sat upon and pressed down, but is kept always watered,

in order that it may not wither from being so constantly sat upon. If

there were to be nothing left but the noblest classes, the citizenic

cinnamon-trees would be completely barked, by means of taxes and

levyings of contributions--(which none but plebeian authors term

"flaying" and "pulling the hide over the ears"),--and, the bark being

off, the trees of course wither and die. At the same time, this process

of aristocratization costs men. But in my opinion it would be cheaply

purchased by the few thousands of people it would cost, seeing that the

Americans, the Swiss, and the Dutch paid (so to speak) whole millions

of men "cash down," on the battlefield, as the price of a freedom of a

much more restricted kind. The fault which is sometimes found with

modern battle pictures, namely that they are overcrowded with people,

can rarely be found with modern countries. We should rather notice the

clever manner in which many German states have, by _energetic_

treatment, _determined_ their population, as morbid matter, in a

_downward_ direction (as good physicians are wont to do), namely, down

to the United States of America, which are situated straight _below_

them.

Kuhschnappel (to return to our subject) has the pull over hundreds of

other towns. I admit, as Nicolai's assertion, that of the 60,000 which

Nürnberg contained there are but 30,000 left, and that is something; at

the same time it takes fifty burghers, and more, to be equivalent to

one aristocrat, which is much. Now I am in a position to show at any

moment by reference to registers of deaths and baptisms, that the

borough of Kuhschnappel contains almost as many aristocrats as

burghers, which is all the more wonderful when we reflect that the

former, on account of their appetites, find it a harder matter to live

than the latter. What modern town, I ask, can point to so many free

inhabitants? Were there not even in free Athens and Rome--in the West

Indies there were of course--more slaves than free men, for which

reason the latter did not dare to make the former wear any distinctive

dress? And are there not in all towns more tenants than noble

landlords, although the latter _ought_, one would think, to be in the

majority, since peasants and burghers grow only by nature, while

aristocrats are raised, both by nature, and by art (in the shape of

princely and imperial chanceries). If this appendix were not a

digression (and digressions are generally expected to be brief) I

should proceed to show, at some length, that in several respects

Kuhschnappel, if she does not surpass, is at least quite on a par with,

many of the towns of Switzerland; for instance, in a good method of

sharpening and lengthening the sword of justice, and, on the whole, in

her manner of wielding a good, spiked, knotty mace--in the tax she

levies on (ecclesiastical) corn, not that imported from abroad, but

that of home growth, to exclude _thought_ and other (in an

ecclesiastical sense) rubbish of that sort--and even in her "green

market," or trade in young men. As regards the latter, the reason why

the trade with France for young Kuhschnappelers to serve as porters and

defenders of the Crown has hitherto been so flat is, that the Swiss

have so terribly overdone the market with fine young fellows who go and

stand in front of all the doors and (in war time) in front of all the

cannons. Of course, were it not for this, there would be more doors

than one with a Kuhschnappeler standing and saying, "Nobody at home."

(Indeed, here in my second edition, I can assert that Kuhschnappel

continues to maintain its title of _imperial market_ town, like a

secondary electoral dignity, and keeps up its old protective laws

against the import of ideas and the export of information, and its

blood tithe; or young men tithe to France, just as Switzerland does,

which is like the keeper of the castle of the Wartburg, who keeps

constantly re-blackening the indelible mark of the ink which Luther

threw at the devil.)

CHAPTER III.

LENETTE'S HONEYMOON--BOOK BREWING--SCHULRATH STIEFEL--MR. EVERARD--

A DAY BEFORE THE FAIR--THE RED COW--ST. MICHAEL'S FAIR--THE

BEGGARS' OPERA--DIABOLICAL TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS, OR THE

MANNIKIN OF FASHION--AUTUMN JOYS--A NEW LABYRINTH.

The world could not make a greater mistake than to suppose that our

common hero would be to be seen on the Monday sitting in a mourning

coach, in a mourning cloak, crape hat-band and scarf, and black

shoe-buckles, figuring as chief mourner at the sham funeral of his

happiness and his capital.

Heavens! how _can_ the world make such an exceedingly bad shot as that?

The advocate was not even in _quarter_ mourning, let alone half; he was

in as good spirits as if he had this third chapter before him, and were

just beginning it, as I am.

The reason was, that he had drawn up an able plaint against his

guardian, Blaise (enlivening it with sundry satirical touches, which

nobody but himself understood), and laid it before the Inheritance

Office. When we are in a difficulty, it is always so much gained if we

can but _do something or other_. Let fortune bluster in our faces with

ever so harsh and frosty an autumn wind--as long as it does not break

the fore joint of our wing (as in the case of the swans), our very

fluttering, though it may not transport us into a warmer climate, will

at all events have the effect of warming us a little. From motives of

kindness, Siebenkæs kept his wife in ignorance of the delay in the

settling of his heritage accounts, as well as of the old story of the

change of names; he thought there was very little likelihood of a

struggling advocate's wife ever having an opportunity of looking over a

patrician's shoulder into his family hand at cards.

And, indeed, what could a man who had made a sudden plunge from out his

hermit's holy-week of single blessedness, into the full honeymoon of

double blessedness wish for besides? Not until now had he been able to

hold his Lenette in both his arms rightly--hitherto his friend, always

fluttering backwards and forwards in life, had been held fast with his

_left_ arm; but now, she was able to stretch herself out far more

comfortably in the chambers of his heart. And the bashful wife did this

as much as she dared. She confessed to him, albeit timidly, that she

was almost glad not to have that boisterous Saufinder lying under the

table and glaring out in that terrible way of his. Whether she

experienced a similar relief at the absence of his wild master, she

could not be brought to say. To the advocate she felt a good deal like

a daughter, and her great tall father could never have enough of her

quaint little ways. That, when he went out, she used to look after him

as long as he was in sight, was nothing in comparison to the way in

which she used to run out after him with a brush, when she noticed from

the window that there was such a quantity of street paving sticking to

his coat-tails that nothing would do but she must have him back again

into the house, and brush his back as clean as if the Kuhschnappel

municipality would charge him paving-tax if any of the mud were found

on him. He would take hold of the brush and stop it, and kiss her, and

say, "There's a good deal _inside_ as well; but nobody sees it there;

when I come back we'll set to work and scrub some of _that_ away."

Her maidenly obedience to his every wish and hint, her daughterly

observance and fulfilment of them, were more than he looked for or

required, indeed; but not too great for the love he bestowed in return.

"Senate clerk's daughter," he said, "you mustn't be _too_ obedient to

me; remember I'm not your father, a senate clerk, but a poor's advocate

who has married you and signs himself Siebenkæs, to the best of his

belief."

"My poor dear father," she answered, "used often to compose and write

down things too at home, himself, with his own hand, and then fair-copy

them beautifully afterwards." But he enjoyed these crooked answers

which she used to make. And though, from sheer veneration of him, she

never understood a single one of the jokes which he was always making

about himself (for she gainsaid him when he satirically depreciated

himself, and agreed with him completely if he ironically lauded

himself), yet these mental provincialisms of hers pleased him not a

little. She would use such words as "fleuch" for "fliehe," "reuch" and

"kreuch" for "riehe" and "kriehe;" religious antiquities out of

Luther's Bible, which were valuable and enjoyable contributions to her

stock of idiosyncracies, and to the happiness of his honeymoon. One day

when he took a particularly pretty cap which she had tried on with

much satisfaction to each of her three cap-blocks, one after another

(she would often gently kiss these cap-blocks), and putting it on her

own little head before the looking-glass, said, "See how it looks on

your _own_ head; perhaps that's as good a block as the others," she

laughed with immense delight, and said, "Now, you are always flattering

one!"

Believe me, this naive failure of hers to see his joke so touched him

that he made a secret vow never to make another of the kind, except in

private to himself. But there was a greater honeymoon pleasure still.

This was that, when there came a fast day, Lenette would on no account

allow him to kiss her, when she came into the room (ready for church),

her white and red bloom of youth shining out with threefold beauty from

under her black lace head-dress, and the dark leafage of her dress.

"Worldly thoughts of that kind," she said, "weren't at all proper

before service, when people had on their fast-day things; people must

wait!"

"By heaven!" said Siebenkæs to himself, "may I stick a soup spoon five

inches long and three broad through my lower lip, like a North American

squaw, and go about with it there, if ever I begin spooning and kissing

the pious soul again, when she has a black dress on, and the bells are

ringing." And though he wasn't much of a churchgoer himself, he kept

his word. See how we men behave in matrimonial life, young ladies!

From all which it will readily appear how perfectly happy the advocate

was during his honeymoon, when Lenette, in the most delightful manner,

did all those things for him which he used previously to have to do for

himself in a most miserable fashion and against the grain, making by

unwearied sweepings and brushings his dithyrambic chartreuse as clean

and level and smooth as a billiard-table. Whole honey-trees full of

cakes did she plant during the honeymoon; humming round him of a

morning like a busy bee, carrying wax into her little hive (while he

was going quietly on with his law-papers, building away at his

juridical wasp's nest), forming her cells, cleaning them out, ejecting

foreign bodies, and mending chinks; he now and then looking out of his

wasp's nest at the pretty little figure in the tidiest of household

dresses, at sight of which he would take his pen in his mouth, hold his

hand out to her across the ink-bottle, and say, "Only wait till the

afternoon comes and you're sitting sewing--then, as I walk up and down,

I shall pay you with kisses to your heart's content." But that none of

my fair readers may be unhappy about the souring of the honey of this

moon which the conduct of that disinheriting blackguard Blaise might

bring about, let me just ask one question? Hadn't Siebenkæs a whole

silver mine and a coining mill, in the shape of seven law suits all

going on, full of veins of rich ore? And hadn't Leibgeber sent him a

military treasury chest on four wheels of fortune, containing two

spectacle dollars of Julius Duke of Brunswig, a Russian triple-dollar

of 1679, a tail or queue ducat--a gnat or wasp dollar--five vicariat

ducats, and a heap of Ephraimites? For he might melt down and

volatilise this collection of coins without a moment's hesitation,

inasmuch as his friend had only pocketed them by way of a jest on the

people who pay a hundred dollars for one. They two had all things

corporeal and mental in common to an extent comprehensible by few. They

had arrived at that point where there is no distinction visible between

the giver and the receiver of a benefit, and they stepped across the

chasms of life bound together, as the crystal-seekers in the Alps tie

themselves to each other to prevent their falling into the ice clefts.

One Lady Day, towards evening, however, he hit upon an idea which will

quite reassure all fair readers of his history who may be in a state of

anxiety about him, and which made _him_ happier than the receipt of the

biggest basket of bread with little baskets of fruit in it would have

done--or a hamper of wine. He had felt sure all along that he _would_

hit upon an idea. Whenever he was in a difficulty of any kind, he

always used to say, "Now, I wonder what I shall hit upon _this_ time;

for I _shall_ hit upon something or other as sure as there are four

chambers in my brain." The delightful idea in question was, that he

should do what I am doing at this moment--write a book; only his was to

be a satirical one.[22] A torrent of blood rushed through the opened

sluices of his heart, right in amongst the wheels and mill-machinery of

his ideas, and the whole of the mental mechanism rattled, whirred, and

jingled in a moment--a peck or two of material for the book was ground

on the spot.

I know of no greater mental tumult--hardly of any sweeter--which can

arise in a young man's being, than that which he experiences when he is

walking up and down his room, and forming the daring resolution that he

will take a book of blank paper and make it into a manuscript; indeed

it is a point which might be argued whether Winckelmann, or Hannibal

the great general, strode up and down _their_ rooms at a greater pace

when they respectively formed the (equally daring) resolution that they

would go to Rome. Siebenkæs, having made up his mind to write a

'Selection from the Devil's Papers,' was forced to run out of the

house, and three times round the market-place, just to fix his

fluttering, rushing ideas into their proper grooves again by the

process of tiring his legs. He came back wearied by the glow within

him--looked to see if there was enough white paper in the house for his

manuscript--and running up to his Lenette, who was tranquilly working

away at a cap, gave her a kiss before she could well take the needle

out of her mouth--last thorn upon the rose-tree! During the kiss she

quietly gave a finishing stitch to the border of the cap (squinting

down at it the best way she could without moving her head).

"Rejoice with me!" he cried, "come and dance about with me! to-morrow

I'm going to begin a work, a book! Roast the calf's head to-night,

though it be a breach of our ten commandments." For he and she, on the

Wednesday before, had formed themselves into a committee on food

regulations, and, of the Thirty-nine articles of domestic economy,

which had then been passed and subscribed to, one was that,

Brahminlike, they were to do without meat at supper.

But he had the greatest difficulty in getting her to understand how it

was that he made out that he would be able to procure her another

calf's head with a single sheet of the 'Selections from the Devil's

Papers,' and that he was perfectly justified in issuing a dispensation

from that evening's fast; for like the common herd of mankind, or like

the printers, Lenette thought that a written book was paid for at the

same rate as a printed one, and that the compositor got rather more

than the author. She had never in her life had the slightest idea of

the enormous sums which authors are paid nowadays; she was like

Racine's wife, who did not know what a line of poetry or a tragedy was,

although she kept house upon them. For my part, however, I should never

lead to the altar, or into my home as my wife, any woman who wasn't

capable of at least completing any sentence which death should knock me

over with his hour-glass in the middle of,--or who wouldn't be

unspeakably delighted when I read to her learned Göttingen gazettes, or

universal German magazines, in which I was bepraised, more than I

deserved perhaps.

The rapture of authorship had set all Siebenkæs's blood-globules into

such a flow, and all his ideas into such a whirlwind this whole evening

that, in the condition of vividness of fueling and fancy in which he

was (a condition which in him often assumed the appearance of temper),

he would instantly have flown out and exploded like so much fulminating

gold at everything of a slow moving kind which he came across--such as

the servant girl's heavy dawdling step, or the species of dropsy with

which her utterance was afflicted;--but that he at once laid hold on a

precious sedative powder for the over-excitement caused by happiness,

and took a dose of it. It is easier to communicate an impetus and a

rapid flow to the slow-gliding blood of a heavy, sorrowful heart, than

to moderate and restrain the billowy, surging, foaming current which

rushes through the veins in happiness; but he could always calm

himself, even in the wildest joy, by the thought of the inexhaustible

Hand which bestowed it, and that gentle tenderness of heart wherewith

our eyes are drooped to earth as we remember the invisible, eternal

Benefactor of all hearts. At such a time the heart, softened by

thankfulness and by joyful tears, will speak its gratitude by at least

being kindlier towards all mankind, if in no other way. That fierce,

untamed delight, which is what Nemesis avenges, can best be kept within

due bounds by this sense of gratitude; and those who have died of joy

would either _not_ have died at all, or would have died of a _better_

and lovelier joy, if their hearts had first been softened by a grateful

heavenward gaze.

His first and best thanksgiving for the new, smooth, beautiful banks,

between which his life-stream had now been led, took the form of a

zealous and careful drawing up of a defence which he had to prepare in

the case of a girl charged with child-murder, to save her from torture

on the rack. The state-physician of the borough had condemned her to

the "trial by the lungs," a neither more nor less suitable punishment

than the "trial by water" (which used to be inflicted on witches).

Calm spring-days of matrimony, peaceful and undisturbed, laid down

their carpet of flowers for the feet of these two to tread upon.

Only there sometimes appeared under the window, when Lenette was

stretching herself and her white arm out of a morning, and slowly

accomplishing the fastening back of the outside shutters, a gentleman

in flesh-coloured silk.

"I really feel quite ashamed to stretch," she said; "there's a

gentleman always standing in the street, and he takes off his hat, and

notes one down just as if he were the meat appraiser."

The Schulrath Stiefel kept, on the school Saturday holidays, the

solemn promise he had made on the wedding-day to come and see them

often, and at all events to be sure and come on the Saturdays. I think

I shall call him Peltzstiefel (Furboots) as a pleasing variety for the

ear--seeing that the whole town gave him that name on account of the

gray miniver, faced with hareskin, which he wore on his legs by way of

a portable wood-economising stove. Well, Peltzstiefel, the moment he

came in at the door, fastened joy-flowers together into a nosegay, and

stuck them into the advocate's button-bole, by appointing him on the

spot his collaborateur on the 'Kuhschnappel Indicator, Heavenly

Messenger, and School Programme Review'--a work which ought to be

better known, so that the works recommended by it might be so too. This

newspaper engagement of Siebenkæs is a great pleasure to me; it will at

any rate bring my hero in sixpence or so towards a supper now and then.

The Schulrath, who was editor of this paper, had a high sense of the

power and responsibility of his post; but Siebenkæs had now risen to

the dignity of an author--the only being who in his eyes was superior

even to a reviewer--for Lenette had told him on the way to church that

her husband was going to have a great thick book printed. The Schulrath

considered the 'Salzburg Literary Gazette' of the period the

apocryphal, and the 'Jena Literary Gazette' the canonical scriptures:

the single voice of one reviewer was, for _his_ ears, multiplied by the

echo in the critical judgment hall into a thousand voices. His deluded

imagination multiplied the head of one single reviewer into several

Lernæan heads, as it was believed of old that the devil used to

surround the heads of sinners with delusive _false_ heads, that the

executioner might miss his stroke at them.

The fact that a reviewer writes anonymously gives to a single

individual's opinions the weight and authority they would possess, if

arrived at by a whole council; but then if his name were put at the

end, for instance, "X.Y.Z., Student of Divinity," instead of "New

Universal German Library," it would weaken the effect of the divinity

student's learned laying down of the law to too great an extent. The

Schulrath paid court to my hero on account of his satirical turn; for

he himself, a very lamb in common life, transformed himself into a

wehrwolf in a review article; which is frequently the case with

good-tempered men when they write, particularly on _humaniora_ and such

like subjects. As indeed, peaceful shepherd races (according to Gibbon)

are fond of making war, and of beginning it, or just as the Idyllic

painter, Gessner, was himself a biting caricaturist.

And our hero for his part afforded Stiefel a great pleasure this

evening, as well as holding out to him the prospect of many more such,

when he took from Leibgeber's collection of coins a gnat or wasp

dollar, and gave it to him, not as a douceur for his appointment

to the critical wasp's nest, but that he might turn it into small

change. The Schulrath who, being himself the zealous "Silberdiener"

(master of the plate and jewels) of a dollar-cabinet of his own,

would have been delighted if money had existed solely for the

sake of cabinets--(meaning, however, numismatic, not political,

cabinets)--sparkled and blushed delighted over the dollar, and declared

to the advocate (who only wanted the absolute value of it, not the

coin-fancier's price) that he considered this a piece of true

friendship. "No," answered Siebenkæs, "the only piece of true

friendship about the matter is Leibgeber giving _me_ the dollar." "But

I'll give you certainly three dollars for it, if you like to ask it,"

said Stiefel. Lenette, delighted at Stiefel's delight, and at his

kindly feeling, and secretly giving her husband a push as an admonition

not to give way, here struck in with an amount of determination which

astonishes me, "But my husband's not going to do anything of the kind,

I assure you; a dollar's a dollar." "But," said Siebenkæs, "I ought

rather to ask you only a _third_ of the price, if I'm going to hand

over my coins to you one at a time in this way." Ye dear souls! If

people's "yeses" in this world were only always such as your "buts."

Stiefel, confirmed bachelor though he was, wasn't going to let himself

be found wanting, on such a delightful occasion as this, at all events,

in proper politeness towards the fair sex, least of all towards a woman

whom he had begun to be so fond of, even when he was bringing her home

to be married, and whom he liked twice as much now that she was the

wife of such a dear friend, and was such a dear friend herself too. He

therefore adroitly led her to join in the conversation (which had

previously been too deep and scholarly for her) by using the three

cap-blocks as stepping-stones over to the journal of fashions; only he

slid back again sooner than he might have done to a more ancient

journal of fashions, that of Rubenius on the 'Costume of the ancient

Greeks and Romans.' He said he should be happy to lend her his sermons

every Sunday, as advocates don't deal in theology much. And when she

was looking on the floor at her feet for the snuffers which had fallen,

he held the candle down that she might see.

The next Sunday was an important day for the house (or rather rooms) of

Siebenkæs, for it introduced thereto a grander character than any who

have appeared hitherto, namely the Venner (Finance Councillor)--Mr.

Everard Rosa von Meyern, a young member of the aristocracy, who went

daily in and out at Heimlicher von Blaise's to "learn the routine of

official business;" he was also engaged to be married to a poor niece

of the Heimlicher's, who was being brought up and educated for his

heart in another part of Germany.

Thus the Venner was a character of consequence in the borough of

Kuhschnappel as well as in our 'Thorn-piece,' and this in every

political point of view. In a corporeal point of view he was much less

so. His body was stuck through his flowered garments much like a piece

of stick through a village nosegay; under the shining wing-covers of

his waistcoat (in itself a perfect animal-picture)[23] there

pulsated a thorax, perpendicular, if not absolutely concave, and his

legs had, all told, about the same amount of calf as those wooden ones

which stocking-makers put into their windows as an advertisement.

The Venner gave the advocate to understand, in a cold and politely rude

manner, that he had merely come to relieve him from the task of

defending the case of child-murder, as he had so much to attend to

besides. But Siebenkæs saw through this pretence with great ease. It

was a well-known circumstance that the girl accused of this crime had

adopted as the father of her child (now flown, away above this earth) a

certain commercial traveller, whose name neither she nor the documents

connected with her case could mention; but that the real father--who,

like a young author, was bashful about putting his name to his _pièce

fugitive_--was no other than the emaciated Venner, Everard Rosa von

Meyern himself. There are certain things which a whole town will

determine and make up its mind to ignore; and one of these was Rosa's

authorship. Heimlicher von Blaise knew that Siebenkæs was aware of it,

however, and feared that he might, out of revenge for the affair of the

inheritance, purposely make a poor defence of the girl, that the shame

and disgrace of her end might fall upon his relative, Meyern's

shoulders. What a terrible, mean suspicion!

And yet the purest minds are sometimes driven to entertain such

suspicions. Fortunately Siebenkæs had already got the poor mother's

lightning-conductor all ready forged and set up. When he showed it to

this false bridegroom of the supposed child-murderess, the latter

immediately declared that she could not have found an abler guardian

saint among all the advocates in the town; to which author and reader

can both add "nor one who should be actuated by worthier motives," as

we know he did it as a thank-offering to Heaven for the first idea of

the 'Devil's Papers.'

At this juncture, the advocate's wife came suddenly back from the

adjoining bookbinder's room, where she had been paying a flying visit.

The Venner sprang to meet her at the threshold with a degree of

politeness which couldn't have been carried further, inasmuch as she

had to open the door before he could reach her. He took her hand,

which, in her respect and awe of him, she half permitted, and kissed it

stooping, but twisted his eyes up to her face, and said:

"Meddem! I have had this beautiful hand in mine for several days."

It now appeared, from what he said, that he was the identical

flesh-coloured gentleman who had stolen her hand with his drawing-pen

when she had had it out of the window; because he had been anxious to

get a pretty Dolce's hand for a three-quarter portrait of the young

lady he was engaged to, and hadn't known what to do; her _head_ he was

doing from memory. He then took off his gloves, in which alone he had

dared as yet to touch her (as many of the early Christians used only to

touch the Eucharist in gloves from reverence therefor), displaying the

fires of his rings and the snow of his skin. To preserve the whiteness

of the latter from the sun, he hardly ever took his gloves off, except

in winter when the sun has scarcely power to burn.

The Kuhschnappel aristocracy, particularly its younger members, give a

willing obedience to the commandment which Christ gave to His apostles,

to "greet no man by the way," and the Venner observed the required

degree of incivility towards the husband, though not by any means to

the wife, towards whom his condescension was infinite. An inborn

characteristic of Siebenkæs's satirical disposition was a fault which

he had of being too polite and kindly with the lower classes, and too

forward and aggressive with the upper. He had not as yet sufficient

knowledge of the world to enable him to determine the precise angle at

which his back should bend before the various great ones of the place,

wherefore he preferred to go about bolt upright, though he did so

against the promptings of his kind heart. An additional cause was, that

the profession to which he belonged being of a belligerent nature, has

a tendency to embolden those who belong to it; an advocate has the

advantage of never requiring to employ one himself, and consequently he

is often inclined to treat even the grandest folks with some amount of

coolness, unless they happen to be judges or clients, at the disposal

of both of which classes of society his best services are at all times

ready to be placed. Notwithstanding which, it generally happened that,

in Siebenkæs's kindly feeling to all mankind, his moveable bridge got

shoved down so low under his tightened strings that the notes given out

by them became quite low and soft. On the present occasion, however, it

was much more difficult to be polite to the Venner (whose designs as

regarded Lenette he was compelled to see) than to be rude to him.

Moreover, he had an inborn detestation for dressy men although--just,

the contrary feeling for dressy women--so that he would often sit and

stare for a long time at the little Fugel-mannikins of dress in the

fashion journals, just to get properly angry at them; and he would

assure the Kuhschnappelers that there was nobody whom he should so

delight in playing practical jokes upon as on such a mannikin--yea, in

insulting him, or even doing him an injury (to the extent of a good

cudgelling). Also it had always been a source of delight to him that

Socrates and Cato walked barefoot about in the market-place; going

_bareheaded_, on the other hand (_chapeau bas_), he did not like half

so much.

But, ere he could utter himself otherwise than by making faces, the

wooden-head of a Venner stroked his sprouting beard, and in a distant

manner graciously offered himself to the advocate in the capacity of

cardinal protector or mediator in the Blaise inheritance business; this

he did, of course, partly to blind the advocate's eyes, and partly to

impress upon him how immeasurably inferior was his station. The latter,

however, shuddering at the idea of taking a gnome of this kind for

paraclete and household angel, said to him (but in Latin)--

"In the first place I must _insist_ that my wife shall not hear a

syllable about that insignificant potato quarrel. And moreover, in any

legal question I scorn and despise anybody's assistance but a legal

friend's, and in this instance _I_ am my own legal friend. I fill an

official position here in Kuhschnappel; it is true, the official

position by no means fills _me_." The latter play upon words he

expressed by means of a Latin one, which displayed such an unusual

amount of linguistic ability, that I should almost like to quote it

here. The Venner, however, who could neither construe the pun nor the

rest of the speech with the ease with which we have read it here,

answered at once (so as to escape without exposing his ignorance) in

the same language, "Imo, immo," which he meant for yes. Firmian then

went on, in German, saying, "Guardian and ward, intimate as their

connection should be, in this case came into contact to an extent

almost too great to be pleasant; although, no doubt, there _have_ been

cases before where one cousin has cozened another:[24] however, the

very members of ecclesiastical councils have come to fisticuffs before

now, _e. g_. at Ephesus in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the Abbot

Barsumas and Dioscurus, Bishop of Alexandria, men of position,

pummelled the good Flavian on that very occasion till he was as dead as

a herring.[25] And this was on a Sunday too, a day on which, in these

absurd old times, a sacred truce was put to quarrels and differences of

every description; though now, Sundays and feast-days are the very days

when the peace is broken; the public-house bells and the tinkling of

the glasses ring the truce _out_, and people pummel each other, so that

the law gets _her_ finger into the pie. In old days, people multiplied

the number of saints' days for the sake of stopping fights, but the

fact is that everybody connected with the legal profession, Herr von

Meyern (who _must_ have _something_ to live upon), ought to petition

that a peaceable working-day or two might be abolished now and then, so

that the number of rows might be increased, and with them the fines and

the fees in like ratio. Yet who thinks of such a thing, Venner?"

He was quite safe in spouting the greater part of this before Lenette;

she had long been accustomed to understanding only a half, a fourth, or

an eighth part of what he said; as for the _whole_ Venner, she gave

herself no concern about him. When Meyern had taken his departure with

frigid politeness, Siebenkæs, with the view of helping to advance him

in his wife's good opinion, extolled his whole and undivided love for

the entire female sex (though engaged to be married), and more

particularly his attachment to that preliminary bride of his, who was

now in the condemned cell of the prison; this, however, rather seemed

to have the effect of _lowering_ him in her good opinion.

"Thou good, kind soul, may you always be as faithful to yourself and to

me!" said he, taking her to his heart. But she didn't _know_ that she

had been faithful, and said, "to whom should I be _un_faithful?"

From this day onwards to Michaelmas Day, which was the day of the

borough fair, fortune seems to have led our _pathway_, I mean the

reader's and mine, through no very special flower-beds to speak of, but

merely along the smooth green turf of an English lawn, one would

suppose on purpose that the fair on Michaelmas Day may suddenly arise

upon our view as some shining, dazzling town starts up out of a valley.

Very little did occur until then; at least, my pen, which only

considers itself bound to record incidents of some importance, is not

very willing to be troubled to mention that the Venner Meyern dropped

in pretty often at the bookbinder's (who lived under the same roof with

the Siebenkæses)--he merely came to see whether the 'Liaisons

Dangereuses' were bound yet.

But that Michaelmas! Truly the world shall remember it. And in fact the

very eve of it was a time of such a splendid and exquisite quality that

we may venture to give the world some account of it.

Let the world _read_ the account of this eve of preparation at all

events, and then give its vote.

On this eve of the fair all Kuhschnappel (as all other places are at

such a time) was turned into a workhouse and house of industry for

women; you couldn't have found a woman in the whole town either sitting

down, or at peace, or properly dressed. Girls the most given to reading

opened no books but needle-books to take needles out, and the only

leaves they turned over were paste ones to be put on pies. Scarcely a

woman took any dinner; the Michaelmas cakes and the coming enjoyment of

them were the sole mainspring of the feminine machinery.

On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of

pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and

minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour's nobility;

and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or

the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They

scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their

consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers;

only the latter (in their friend's and hostess's houses) tastes best,

and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony

and shot and dagger proof--or is burnt to a cinder--or, in short, is

wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the

failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking

them to their own houses and treating them to something of a _very

different_ kind.

As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker

of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and

female connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but

she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The

kitchen fire was this salamander's second element, for the first and

native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand,

and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like

Siebenkæs's (who had devoted all Leibgeber's Ephraimites to the keeping

of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her

glowing face on such a day--and indeed she had her hands pretty full,

for at ten o'clock the butcher came bringing more work with him.

The world will be glad (I'm perfectly certain in my own mind) if

I just give them a very short account of this business--_who_ could

have done it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at

the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together

and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to

fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor's advocate and the

hairdresser--between whom and his tenants there was this distinction,

that they owed _their_ rent to _him_, whereas he owed _his_ to his

creditors--caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which

was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic instrument (here

KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual

manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the Roman

law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the

four contracting parties aforesaid--who all stood attentively round the

document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted--bound and engaged

themselves in manner following, that is to say, that--

1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said

cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.

2ndly. That this Cooking or Fattening Society might and should defray

from a common treasury chest the price of said cow, the cost of the

carriage of implements and provisions, and maintenance generally of the

same; and

3rdly. That the allied powers as aforesaid should not only on the day

before Michaelmas, the 28th September, 1785, slaughter the said cow,

but further that each quarter of the same should then and there be

further divided into four quarters, conformably to the lex agraria, for

partition among the said parties to the said contract.

Siebenkæs prepared four certified copies of this treaty, one for each;

he never wrote anything with graver pleasure. All that now remained to

be performed of the contract by the house association of our four

evangelists, who had collectively adopted as their armorial crest or

emblematic animal, one single joint-stock beast, namely, the female of

that of Saint Luke--was the third article of it.

However, I know the learned classes are panting for my fair, so I shall

only dash down a hurried sketch of my Man-and-Animal piece (Kolbe of

course goes on taking me to task).

That Septembriseur, the butcher, did his part of the business well,

though it was at the close of Fructidor--the four messmates looking on

throughout the operation, as also did old Sabine, who did a good deal,

and got something for it. The quadruple alliance regaled itself on the

slain animal at a general picnic, to which each contributed something

in order that the butcher might be included gratis; and it is

undeniable that one member of the league, whom I shall name hereafter,

attended this picnic in a frame of mind and in a costume barely serious

enough for the occasion. The slaughter confederation then set to

working its division sum, according to the number of its members, and

the golden calf round which their dance was executed was cut, up with

the appropriate heraldic cuts. Then the whole thing was over. I think I

can say nothing more laudatory of the manner in which the whole process

of zootomic division was carried out than what Siebenkæs, an interested

party, said himself, viz., "It's to be wished that the twelve tribes of

Israel, as well as, in later times, the Roman empire, had been divided

into as many and as fair divisions as our cow and Poland have been."

I shall be doing ample justice to the cow's embonpoint if I merely

mention that Fecht the cobbler uttered a panegyric which commenced with

the most lively and vigorous oaths, and the statement that she was an

(adjective) bag of skin and bones, and ended with an assurance, uttered

in mild and pious accents that Heaven had indeed favoured the poor

beast, and "blessed us unworthy sinners above measure." A frolicsome

cult by nature, he had had the heavy coach-harness of pietism put on to

him, and was consequently obliged to keep softening down the "strong

language" which came naturally to him into the pious sighs appropriate

to his "converted state." And it was to the frame of mind and the

costume of this very FECHT that I made allusion above as being barely

suitable to the occasion, for I'm sorry to say he had no breeches on

him the whole day of this great slaughter, but ran up and down the

slaughter-house in a white frieze frock of his wife's, having a strange

general effect of looking something like his own better half. However,

the members of the association didn't take any offence; he couldn't

help it, because while he was going about got up in this Amazon's

_demi-negligée_, and presenting this hermaphrodite appearance, his own

black-leather leg-cases were in the dye pot, being prepared for a

reissue.

The poor's advocate had begged Lenette (about a quarter past four in

the afternoon) not to go on working herself to death, and never to mind

bothering about any supper, as he was going to be miserly for once,

save himself a supper tonight, and sup upon eighteen penn'orth of

pastry: but the busy soul kept running about brushing and sweeping, and

by six o'clock they were both lying resting in the leather arms of--a

big easy chair (for he had no flesh and she no bones), and looking

around them with that expression of tranquil happiness which you may

see in children while eating, at the room in its state of mathematical

order, at the way in which everything in it was shining, at the pastry

new-moon-crescents in their hands, and at the liquid burnished gold (or

rather foilgold[26]) of the setting sun creeping up and up upon the

gleaming tin dishes. There they rested and reposed like cradled

children, with the screeching, clattering, twelve herculean labours of

the rest of the people of the house going on all round them; and the

clearness of the sky and the newly cleaned windows added a full

half-hour to the length of the day; the bell-hammer, or tuning-hammer

of the curfew bell gently let down the pitch of their melodious wishes

till they lapsed into dreams.

At ten o'clock they woke up and went to bed...!

I quite enjoy this little starry night picture myself; though my head

has reflected it all glimmery and out of focus, as the gilt hemisphere

of my watch does the evening sun when I hold it up to it. Evening is

the time when we weary, hunted men long to be at rest; it is for the

evening of the day, for the evening of the year (autumn), and for the

evening of life, that we lay up our hard-earned harvests, and with such

eager hopes! But hast thou never seen in fields, when the crops were

gathered, an image and emblem of thyself--I mean the autumn daisy, the

flower of harvest; she delays her blossom till the summer is past and

gone, the winter snows cover her before her fruit appears, and it is

not till the--coming spring that that fruit is ripe!

But see how the roaring, dashing surges of the fair-day morning come

beating upon our hero's bedposts! He comes into the white, shining

room, which Lenette had stolen out of bed like a thief before midnight

to wash while he was in his first sleep, and had sanded all over like

an Arabia; in which manner she had her own way while he had his. On a

fair-day morning I recommend everybody to open the window and lean out,

as Siebenkæs did, to watch the rapid erection and hiring of the wooden

booths in the market-place, and the falling of the first drops of the

coming deluge of people, only let the reader observe that it wasn't by

my advice that my hero, in the very arrogance of his wealth (for there

were samples of every kind of pastry which the house contained on a

table behind him), called down to many of the little green aristocratic

caterpillars whom he saw moving along in the street with even greater

arrogance than his own, and whose natural history he felt inclined to

learn by a look at their faces.

"I say, sir, will you just be good enough to look at that house, that

one there--do you notice anything particular?"

If the caterpillar lifted up its physiognomy, he could peruse and study

it at his ease,--which was of course his object.

"You don't notice anything particular?" he would ask.

When the insect shook its head, he concurred with it, and did the same

up at the window, saying:

"No, of course not! I've been looking at it for the last twelve months

myself, and can't see anything particular about it; but I didn't choose

to believe my own eyes."

Giddypated Firmian! Your seething foam of pleasure may soon drop down

and disappear--as it did that Saturday when the cards were left. As

yet, however, his little drop of must which he has squeezed out of the

forenoon hours was foaming and sparkling briskly. The landlord moved at

a gallop, casting (with his powder-sowing machine) seed into a fruitful

soil. The bookbinder conveyed his goods (consisting partly of empty

manuscript books, partly of still emptier song books, partly of

"novelties," in almanacs) to the fair by land-carriage in a

wheelbarrow, which he had to make two journeys with in going, but only

one in returning in the evening, because then he had got rid of his

almanacs to purchasers and to sellers (almanacs are the greatest of all

novelties, or pieces of news--for there is nothing in all the long

course of time so new as the new year). Old Sabel had set up her East

India house, her fruit garner, and her cabinet of tin rings at the town

gate; she wouldn't have let that warehouse of hers go to her own

brother at a lower figure than half-a-sovereign. The cobbler put a

stitch in no shoe on this St. Michael's Day except his wife's.

Suck away, my hero, at your nice bit of raffinade sugar of life, and

empty your forenoon sweetstuff spoon, not troubling your head about the

devil and his grandmother, although the pair of them should be thinking

(after the nature of them) about getting a bitter potion, even a poison

cup, made ready and handing it to you.

But his greatest enjoyment is still to come, to wit, the numberless

beggar people. I will describe this enjoyment, and so distribute it.

A fair is the high mass which the beggars of all ranks and classes

attend; when it is still a day or two off, all the footsoles that have

nothing to walk upon but compassionate hearts, are converging towards

the spot like so many radii, but on the morning of the fair-day itself

the whole annual congress of beggardom and the column of cripples are

fairly on the march. Anyone who has seen _Fŭrth_, or been in

Elwangen during P. Gassner's government, may cut these few leaves out

of his copy; but no one else has any idea of it till I proceed and lead

him in at the town-gate of Kuhschnappel.

The street choral service and the vocal serenades now commence. The

blind sing like blinded singing-birds--better, but louder; the lame

walk; the poor preach the gospel themselves; the deaf and dumb make a

terrible noise, and ring in the feast with little bells--everybody

sings his own tune in the middle of everybody else's--a paternoster is

clattering at the door of every house, and in the rooms inside nobody

can hear himself swear. Whole cabinets of small coppers are lavished on

one hand, pocketed on the other. The one-legged soldiery spice their

ejaculatory prayers with curses, and blaspheme horribly, because people

don't give them enough--in brief, the borough which had made up its

mind for a day's enjoyment, is invaded and almost taken by storm by the

rabble of beggars.

And now the maimed and the diseased begin to appear. Whoever has a

wooden jury-leg under him, sets it and his long third leg and

fellow-labourer the crutch, in motion towards Kuhschnappel, and drives

and plants his sharp-pointed timber toe into moist earth there in the

vicinity of the town-gate, in hopes of its thriving and bearing fruit.

Whosoever has no arms or hands left, stretches both out for an alms.

Those to whom Heaven has entrusted the beggars' talent, disease, above

all paralysis, the beggars' _vapeurs_--trades with his talent, and the

body appertaining to it, levying contributions with it on the whole and

the sound. People who might stand as frontispieces to works on surgery

and medicine, quite as appropriately as at city gates, take up their

position near the latter and announce what they lack, which is, first

and foremost, other people's cash. There are plenty of legs, noses, and

arms in Kuhschnappel, but a great many more people. There is one most

extraordinary fellow--(to be admired at a distance, though impossible

to be equalled--looked upon with envy, though indeed only by such

blotting-paper souls as can never see supreme excellence without

longing to possess it); there's only half of him there, because the

other half's in his grave already, everything you could call legs

having been shot clean away; and these shots have placed him in a

position at once to arrogate and assume to himself the primacy and

generalship-in-chief of the cripples, and be drawn about on a triumphal

car as a kind of demigod, whose soul, in place of a corporeal garment,

has on merely a sort of cape and short doublet. "A soldier," said

Siebenkæs, "who is still afflicted with one leg, and who on that ground

expostulates with fate, inquiring of her, 'Why am _I_ not shot to

pieces like that cripple, so that I might make as much in the day as he

does?' seems to forget that on the other side of the question there are

thousands of other warriors besides himself who haven't even _one_

wooden leg (let alone more), but are totally unprovided with even

_that_ fire- and begging-certificate; moreover, that however many of

his limbs he might have been relieved of by bullets, he might still

keep on asking, 'Why not more?'"

Siebenkæs was merry over the poor because they are merry over

themselves; and he never would kick up a politico-economical row about

their occasionally tippling and guzzling a little too much,--when, for

instance, a whole lazarette-wagon, or ambulance-load of them, halting

at some shepherd's hut, they get down, and go in, and their plasters,

their martyrs' crowns, their spiked girdles and hair-shirts come off,

leaving nothing but a brisk human being who has left off sighing just

for a minute; or--since what everybody works for is, not merely to

live, but to live a little better now and then--when the beggar too has

something a little better than his everyday fare, and when the cripple

pulls the goddess of joy into his boarded dancing-barn to dance with

him as his partner, and her hot mask falls off in the waltz (as for

_our_ ball-rooms, it never falls off in them).

About 11 o'clock, the devil, as I have half hinted already, dropped a

handful of blue-bottle flies into Firmian's wedding soup--to wit, Herr

Rosa von Meyern, who graciously intimated his aristocratic intention of

coming to call that afternoon, "because there was such a good view of

the market-place." People of impecunious gentility, who can't issue

orders in any houses but their own, construct _in_ their own, with much

ease, loopholes whence they can fire upon the enemy who makes his

attack from--within. The advocate had a piece of rudeness towards the

Venner to put into either scale of his balance of justice, so as to

determine which was the least of the two. The one was, to let him be

told he might stay where he was; the other, to let him in, and then

behave just as though the noodle were up in the moon. Siebenkæs chose

the latter as the smaller.

Women, good souls, have always to carry and hold up the Jacob's

ladder by which the male sex mount into the blue æther and into the

evening-red; this call of the Venner came as an extra freight loaded on

to Lenette's two burden-poles of arms. The laving of all moveable

property, and the aspersion of all immoveable, recommenced. Meyern, the

false lover of the poor child-murderess, Lenette detested with all her

heart; at the same time, all her polishing machinery was at once set

agoing on the room, indeed, I think women dress themselves more and

with greater pains for their lady-enemies than for their lady-friends.

The advocate went up and down, all behung with long chains of

ratiocination, like a ghost, and would fain have succeeded in imbuing

her with the idea that she shouldn't give herself the slightest bother

of any kind about the nincompoop. "It was no good," she said, "what

would he think of me?" It was not until having eliminated from the room

as a piece of crudity his old ink-bottle, into which he had only that

minute put ink-powder to dissolve and make ink for the 'Selection from

the Devil's Papers,' she was about to lay hands on that holy ark, his

writing-table--that the head of the house ramped up--on his hind legs,

pointing with his fore paw to the line of demarcation.

Rosa appeared! Nobody who had just a little soft place in his heart

could really have cursed this youngster, or beaten him into a jelly;

one rather got to feel a kind of a liking for him, between his pranks.

He had white hair on his head and on his chin, and was soft all over;

and had stuff like milk instead of blood in his veins, like the

insects, just as poisonous plants have generally white milky juice. He

was of a very forgiving nature, especially towards women, and often

shed more tears himself in an evening at the theatre than he had caused

many whom he had ruined to let fall. His heart was really not made of

stone, or lapis infernalis, and if he prayed for a certain time, he

grew pious during the process and sought out the most time-honoured of

religious formularies to give in his adhesion to them then and there.

Thunder was to him a watchman's rattle, arousing him from the sleep of

sin. He loved to take the needy by the hand, especially if the hand was

pretty. All things considered, he may perhaps get to heaven sooner or

later; for, like many debtors in the upper circles of society, he

doesn't pay his play-debts, and he also has in his heart an inborn

duel-prohibition against shooting and hacking. As yet he is not a man

of his word; and if he were poorer, he would steal without a moment's

hesitation. Like a lap-dog, he lies down wagging his tail at the feet

of people of any importance, but tugs women by the skirts, or shows his

teeth and snarls at them.

Pliant water-weeds of this sort fall away from the very slightest

satiric touch, and you can't manage to hit them with one, richly as

they deserve it, because its effect is only proportionate to the

resistance it meets with. Siebenkæs would have been better pleased had

Von Meyern only been a little rougher and coarser, for it is just these

yielding, pitiful, sapless, powerless sort of creatures that filch away

good fortune, hard cash, feminine honour, good appointments and fair

names, and are exactly like the ratsbane or arsenic, which, when it is

good and pure, must be quite white, shining and transparent.

Rosa appeared, I have said, but oh! lovely to behold beyond expression!

His handkerchief was a great Molucca of perfume; his two side locks

were two small ones. On his waistcoat he had a complete animal kingdom

painted (as the fashion of the day was), or Zimmermann's Zoological

Atlas. His little breeches and his little coat, and every thing

about him salted the women of the house into Lottish salt-pillars,

merely in passing them by on his way upstairs, I must, say, though,

that what dazzle me personally, are the rings which emboss six of his

fingers,--there were profile portraits, landscapes, stones, even

beetle-wing covers all employed in this gold-shoeing of his fingers.

We may quite properly apply to the human hand the expression "it was

shod with rings like a horse's hoof," it has been long applied to the

horse's hoof itself, and Daubenton has proved, by dissections, that the

latter contains all the different parts of the human hand. The use of

these hand or finger manacles is quite proper and permissible; indeed

rings are indispensable to the fingers of those who ought by rights to

have them in their noses. According to the received opinion, these

metal spavins, or excrescences of the fingers, were only invented to

make pretty hands ugly, as a kind of chain and nose-rings to keep

vanity in check; so that fists which are ugly by nature can easily

dispense with these disfigurements. I should like to know whether there

is anything in another idea of mine bearing on this subject. It is

this. Pascal used to wear a great iron ring with sharp spines on it

round his naked body, that he might always be ready to punish himself

for any vain thought which might occur to him by giving this ring a

slight pressure; now is it not perhaps the case that these smaller and

prettier rings in a similar way chastise any vain thoughts which may

occur, by slightly, but frequently hurting? They _seem_ at least to be

worn with some such object, for it is exactly the people who suffer

most from vanity who wear the greatest quantities of them, and move

about their beringed hands the most.

Unwished-for visits often pass off better than others; on this occasion

everyone got on pretty comfortably. Siebenkæs of course was in his own

house--and behaved himself accordingly. He and the Venner looked out of

the window at the people in the market-place. Lenette, in accordance

with her upbringing, and the manners and customs of the middle classes

of small towns, didn't venture to be otherwise than silent, or at the

most to take an exceedingly subordinate, obligato, accompanying part in

the concert of a conversation between men; she fetched and carried in

and out, and, in fact, sat most of the time down stairs with the other

women. It was in vain that the courteous, gallant Rosa Everard, tried

upon her his wonted wizard spells to root women to a given spot. To her

husband he complained that there was little real refinement in

Kuhschnappel, and not one single amateur theatre where one could act,

as there was in Ulm. He had to order his new books and latest fashions

from abroad.

Siebenkæs in return expressed to him merely his enjoyment over

the--beggars in the market-place. He made him notice the little boys

blowing red wooden trumpets, loud enough to burst the drum of the ear,

if not to overthrow the walls of Jericho. But he added, with proper

thoughtfulness, that he shouldn't omit to notice those other poor

devils who were collecting the waste bits of split wood in their caps

for fuel. He asked him if, like other members of the chamber, he

disapproved of lotteries and lotto, and whether he thought it was very

bad for the Kuhschnappel common people's morals that they should be

crowding about an old cask turned upside down, with an index fixed to

the bottom of it which revolved round a dial formed of gingerbread and

nuts, and where the shareholders, for a small stake, carried off from

the banker of the establishment, a greedy old harridan of a woman, a

nut or a ginger cake. Siebenkæs took pleasure in the little, because in

his eyes it was a satirical, caricaturing diminishing mirror of

everything in the shape of burgherly pomposity. The Venner saw no

entertainment whatever in double-meaning allusions of the kind; but

indeed the advocate never dreamt of amusing anybody but himself with

them. "I may surely speak out whatever I like to myself," he once said;

"what is it to me if people choose to listen behind my back, or before

my face either?"

At length he went down among the people in the market-place, not

without the full concurrence of the Venner, who expected at last to be

able to have some rational conversation with the wife. Now that Firmian

was gone, Everard begun to feel in his element, swimming in his own

native pike-pond as it were. As an introductory move he constructed for

Lenette a model of her native town; he knew a good many streets and

people in Augspurg, and had often ridden through the Fuggery, and it

seemed only yesterday, he said, that he saw her there working at a

lady's hat, beside a nice old lady, her mother he should think. He took

her right hand in his (in an incidental manner), she allowing him to do

so out of gratefulness for calling up such pleasant memories; he

pressed it--then suddenly let it go to see if she mightn't just have

returned the pressure the least bit in the world, in the confusion of

fingers as it were--or should try to _recover_ the lost pressure. But

he might as well have pressed Götz von Berlichingen's iron hand with

his thievish thumb as her warm one. He next came upon the subject of

her millinery work, and talked about cap and bonnet fashions like a man

who knew what he was talking about; whereas when Siebenkæs mixed

himself up with these questions, he displayed no real knowledge of the

subject at all. He promised her two consignments, of patterns from Ulm,

and of customers from Kuhschnappel. "I know several ladies who _must_

do what I ask them," he said, and showed her the list of his

engagements for the coming winter balls in his pocket-book; "I shan't

dance with them if they don't give you an order." "I hope it won't come

to that," said Lenette (with many meanings). Finally, he was obliged to

ask her to let him see her at work for a little, his object here being

to weaken the enemy by effecting a diversion of her forces--her eyes

being occupied with her needle, she could only have her ears at liberty

to observe him with. She blushed as she took two bodkins and stuck one

of them into the round red little pincushion of--her mouth; this was

more than he could really allow, it was so very dangerous--it formed a

hedge against himself--and she might swallow either the stiletto in

question, or at all events some of the poisonous verdigris off it. So

he drew this lethal weapon with his own hand out of its sheath in her

lips, scratching the cherry mouth a little, or not at all--as he loudly

lamented--in the process, however. A venner of the right sort considers

himself liable in a case of this kind for the fees and expenses

consequent upon the accident; Everard, in his liberality, took

out his English patent pomade, smeared some on to her left forefinger,

and applied the salve to the invisible wound with the finger as a

spatula--in doing which he was obliged to take hold of her whole hand

as the _handle_ of the spatula, and frequently squeeze it

unconsciously. He stuck the unfortunate stiletto itself into his shirt

front, giving her his own breastpin instead, and exposing his own

tender white breast to--the cold. I particularly beg persons who have

had experience in this description of service to give their opinion

with firm impartiality on my hero's conduct, and, sitting in court

martial on him, to point out such of his movements and dispositions as

they may consider to have been ill-advised.

Now that she was wounded, poor thing, he wouldn't let her go on

working, but only show him her finished productions. He ordered a copy

of one of them for Madame von Blaise. He begged her to put it on and

let him see it on her--and he set it himself just as Madame von Blaise

would wear it. By heaven! it was better even than he had thought; he

swore it would suit Madame von Blaise quite as well, as she was just

the same height as Lenette. This was all stuff and nonsense, really the

one was taller by quite half a nose than the other. Lenette said so

herself, she had seen Madame von Blaise at church. Rosa stuck to his

own opinion, and swore by his soul and salvation (for in cases of the

kind he was given to profane language), and by the sacrament, that

he had measured himself with her a hundred times, and that she was

half-an-inch taller than himself. "By heaven!" he said, suddenly

jumping up, "of course I carry her measure about with me, like her

tailor; all that need be done is that _you_ and _I_ measure ourselves

together."

I shall not here withhold from little girls a golden rule of war

made by myself, "Don't argue long with a man, whatever it may be

about--warmth is always warmth, even if it only be warmth of

argument--one forgets one's self, and ultimately takes to proving by

syllogistic figures, and this is just what the enemy wants--he converts

these figures into poetical figures--ultimately even into plastic

figures."

Lenette, a little giddy with the rapid whirl of events, good naturedly

stood up to serve as recruit measure for her recruit Rosa; he leant his

back to hers. "This won't do," he said, "I can't see," and unlocked his

fingers which had been intertwined together, backwards, over the region

of her heart. He turned quickly round, stood before her, and embraced

her gently, so as to determine, by comparing the levels of their eyes,

whether their brows were an exact height or not. His were glaring quite

an inch higher up than hers; he clasped her closely and said, turning

red, "you see you were right; but my mistake was that I added your

beauty to your height," and in this proximity he pressed his mouth, red

as sealing-wax, upon her lips, very founts and sources of truth as they

were.

She was ashamed, annoyed and embarrassed, angry, and ready to cry, but

had not the courage to let her indignation break out upon a gentleman

of quality. She didn't speak another word then. He set her and himself

at the window, and said he would read her some songs, of rather a

different kind, he hoped, to those which were being hawked down

in the street. For he was one of the greatest poets in Kuhschnappel,

although as yet it was not so much that his verses had made him known,

as that he had made his verses known. His poems, like so many others

nowadays, were like the muses themselves, children of memory. Every

old Frankish town has at least its one fashionable fop, a person

who _fait les honneurs_; and every town, however old, prosaic,

imperial-judicature-endowed, possesses its genius, its poet, and

sentimentalist; often both these offices are filled by the same

individual--as was the case in Kuhschnappel. The greater and likewise

the lesser house of assembly looked upon Rosa as a mighty genius,

smitten with the genius-epidemic-fever. This disease is something like

elephantiasis, of which Troil in his travels in Iceland gives such an

accurate description in twenty-four letters, and the principal features

of which are that the patient is exactly like an elephant as to hair,

cracks, colour, and lumps of the skin, but has not the _power_ of the

elephant, and lives in a _cold_ climate.

Everard took a touching elegy out of one of his pockets, the left one,

in which (I mean in the elegy) a noble gentleman, lovesick, sang

himself to death; and he told her he should like to read it to her, if

his feelings would let him get through it without breaking down.

However, the poem shortly drew more than one tear and emotion from its

owner, and he, to his honour, was constrained to furnish a fresh proof

of the fact that however manly and cold he and poets of his stamp can

be to the heaviest sorrows of humanity, they really cannot quite

contain themselves at the woes of love, but are compelled to weep at

them. Meanwhile Rosa, who, like swindlers at play, always kept one eye

upon a reflecting surface of some sort--water, window panes, or

polished steel for instance, so as to catch a passing glimpse of the

female countenance from time to time--saw by means of a little mirror

in one of the rings of his left hand, in which hand he was holding the

elegy, just a trace or two in Lenette's eyes of the tragic dew left

there by his poem. So he pulled out of his second pocket a ballad (it

is, no doubt, printed long ago) in which an innocent child murderess,

with a tearful adieu to her lover, throws herself upon a sword. This

ballad (very unlike his other poetical children) had real poetic merit,

for luckily (for the poem at least) he was a lover of that kind

himself, so that he could speak _from_ the heart _to_ the heart. It is

not easy to portray the emotion and the melting pitying tears on

Lenette's face; all her heart rose to her tear-dimmed eyes.

It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a

combination of truth and fiction.

The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette's

arms, and cried--

"Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!"

I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and

incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved

him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high

horse and said he must have some souvenir of this "sacred entrancing

moment"--only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his

high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form

the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing

she gave enough to stuff a pillow--all this put into her head the

foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such

as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort.

He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself

in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn't have interfered; she

might indeed have shed her _blood_ to save him, but not a single _hair_

of her head.

He had still one resource _in petto_--he had really never met with such

a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would

get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay

over his inheritance--and that with the greatest ease, because he would

threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it--if she would just take the

scissors and cut off a _little_ hair memorial, no bigger even than the

fourth part of a moustache.

She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was

consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state,

to give a prosaic, detailed account of the _species facti_ of the whole

of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the

number of the 'Gazette' in which the inheritance chamber's inquiry as

to the advocate's existence appeared in print, and he was able to put

it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly,

not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her

nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn't

quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married

to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster,

and in her passion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her

have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental

circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling

and imploring her for one little lock.

But we must first look after her husband a little, and see how he is

getting on, and whither he bends his steps. At first among the market

stalls; for the many-throated roaring, and the Olla Podrida of cheap

pleasures, and the displayed pattern cards of all the rags out of, and

upon, which we human clothes moths construct our covering cases and our

abodes--all these caused his mind to sink deep into a sea of

humoristic-melancholy reflections concerning this mosaic picture of a

life of ours, made up as it is of so many little bits, many-tinted

moments, motes, atoms, drops, dust, vapours. He laughed, and listened,

with an emotion incomprehensible by many of my readers, to a ballad

singer, bawling, with his rhapsodist's staff in his right hand pointed

at a big, staring picture of a horrible murder, and his left full of

smaller, printed pictures, for sale, in which the misdeed and the

perpetrator of it were displayed to the German public in no brighter

colours than those of poetry. Siebenkæs bought two copies, and put them

in his pocket, to read in the evening.

This tragic murder picture evoked in the background of his fancy that

of the poor girl he had defended, and the gallows, on to which fell

those burning tears which had flowed from his wounded heart--that heart

which nobody on earth, save one, understood--when last it had been

lacerated. He left the noisy market-place, and sought all-peaceful

nature, and that isolatorium, destined alike for friendship and for

guilt, the gallows. When we pass from the stormy uproar of a fair into

the still expanse of wide creation, entering into the dim aisles of

nature's hushed cathedral, the strange sudden calm, is to the soul as

the caressing touch of some beloved hand.

With a sad heart he climbed up to the well-known spot, whose ugly name

I shall omit, and from these ruins he gazed around upon creation, as if

he were the last of living beings. Neither in the blue sky, nor upon

the wide earth, was there voice or sound; nothing but one forlorn

cricket, chirping in monosyllables, among the bare furrows, where

the harvest had been cleared away. The troops of birds flocking

together with discordant cries flew to the green nets spread upon the

ground--and not to meet the green spring far away. Above the meadows,

where all the flowers were withered and dead, above the fields, where

the corn ears waved no more, floated dim phantom forms, all pale and

wan, faint pictures of the past. Over the grand eternal woods and hills

a biting mist was draped in clinging folds, as if all nature, trembling

into dust, must vanish in its wreaths. But one bright thought pierced

these dark fogs of nature and the soul, turning them to a white

gleaming mist, a dew all glittering with rainbow colours, and gently

lighting upon flowers. He turned his face to the north-east, to the

hills which lay between him and his other heart, and up from behind

them rose, like an early moon in harvest, a pale image of his friend.

The spring, when he should go to him and see him once more, was at work

already preparing for him a fair broad pathway thither, all rich with

grass and flowers. Ah! how we play with the world about us, so quickly

dressing it all with the webs which our own spirits spin.

The cloudless sky seemed sinking closer to the dusky earth, bright with

a softer blue. And though a whole long winter lay between, the music of

the coming spring already came, faint and distant, to his ear; it was

there in the evening chime of the cattle bells down in the meadows, in

the birds' wild wood notes in the groves, and in the free streams

flowing fast away amid the flowery tapestries that were yet to be.

A palpitating chrysalis was hanging near him still in her

half-shrivelled caterpillar's case, sleeping away the time till the

flower cups all should open; phantasy, that eye of the soul, saw beyond

and over the sheaves of autumn the glories of a night in June; every

autumn-tinted tree seemed blooming once again; their bright coloured

crests, like magnified tulips, painted the autumn mist with rainbow

dyes; light breezes of early May seemed chasing each other through the

fresh, fluttering leaves; they breathed upon our friend, and buoyed him

up, and rose with him on high, and held him up above the harvest and

above the hills, till he could see beyond these hills and lands--and

lo! the springs of all his life to come, lying as yet enfolded in the

bud, lay spread before his sight like gardens side by side--and there,

in every spring time, stood his friend.

He left the place, but wandered a long while about the meadows,

where at this time of year there was no need to hunt carefully for

footpaths--chiefly that his eyes might not betray where his thoughts

had been to all the market people who were to be met. It was of little

use--for in certain moods the torn and wounded heart, like injured

trees, bleeds on and on, and at the slightest touch.

He shunned eye-witnesses, such as Rosa above all, for this reason, that

he was (I am sorry to have to say it) in just one of those moods when,

whether from modesty or from vividness of feeling, he was most disposed

to mask his emotion under the semblance of temper. At last a weapon of

victory came to his hand, the thought that he had to apologize and make

amends to his guest for so long and so uncourteous an absence.

When he got home what a strange state of matters! The old guest

gone--another there in his place--and near the latter his wife in

tears. When he came into the room, Lenette went to one of the windows,

and a fresh torrent of tears fell down. "Madame Siebenkæs," said the

Schulrath, continuing his address to her, and keeping hold of her hand,

"submit yourself to the will of God, I beseech you; nothing has

happened but what can be put to rights without difficulty. I am willing

to concede you a sorrow of the heart--but it must be a restrained and a

subdued one."

Lenette looked out of the window, not at her husband.

The Schulrath related, in the first place, all that I have already

given my account of (Firmian, listening to him and looking at him, took

the glowing hand of Lenette, whose face was still averted), and then

continued--

"When I came in, merciful Heavens, there was his lordship on his knees

before Madame Siebenkæs, with carnal tears, and--I am constrained to

have the gravest suspicions--a design upon her precious honour!

However, I raised him up, without the least ceremony, and I said to

him, with the boldness of St. Paul himself--for which I am ready to

answer before God and man--'Your Lordship, are these the doctrines

which I inculcated into your Lordship when I was your private tutor; is

it Christian conduct to go down upon your knees in such a manner? Fie,

for shame, Herr von Meyern. Fie, for shame, Herr von Meyern!'"

Here the Schulrath got into a terrible heat again, and strode up and

down the room with his hands in the pockets of his plush coat.

Firmian said, "It's a simple matter to set up a scarecrow and plant a

hedge to keep off a hare like _him_; but what ails _you_, love," he

said, "and what are you crying so bitterly about?"

She cried more bitterly than ever; when the Schulrath planted his hands

on his sides, and said to her in much wrath, "Very well, Madame

Siebenkæs, this is the way of it, is it? This is all the impression my

good counsel and comforting words have made upon your mind, is it? I

never should have believed it of you!

"It was all for nothing then (as I am constrained to conclude) that,

when I had the honour of bringing you here from Augspurg in my

carriage, I described to you with all the eloquence at my command, the

blessedness of the married state, before you had had an opportunity of

learning it by experience; it seems I might just as well have spoken to

the winds of heaven. Can it really be the case that all that I said to

you in the carriage simply went in at one ear and out at the other?

when I told you how happy a wife was in and through her husband, how

she often could hardly help crying for joy at possessing him--how these

two had but one heart and one flesh, and shared everything between

them, joy and sorrow, every morsel of food, every wish and desire, ay

and the very smallest secrets. Well, well, Madame Siebenkæs, I see the

Schulrath may keep his breath to cool his porridge."

Upon this she twice wiped and dried her eyes hurriedly, constrained

herself to look at him very kindly indeed, and with a forced appearance

of being quite pleased again, and said with a deep sigh, but softly and

not in a tone of pain, "Oh dear me!"

The Schulrath touched her hand as it hung down with his finger tips in

a priestly manner, and said--

"But may the Lord be your physician and helper in all your necessities"

(he could hardly say more, for his tears were coming), "Amen,--which

is, being interpreted, 'Yea, verily, so mote it be.'" Here he embraced

and kissed the husband, and this with much warmth, saying, "Send for

me, if your wife can obtain no consolation--and may God give you both

strength. O, by the by--the very thing I came here about--the review of

the Easter programme must be ready by Wednesday--and I am in your debt

for the eight lines or more you did about that piece of rubbish the

other day, which you gave such a capital dressing to."

When he had gone, however, Lenette didn't seem so thoroughly consoled

as might have been expected: she leant at the window sunk in deep,

hopeless, amazement and reflection. It was in vain that Firmian pointed

out that of course he wasn't going to change his and her present name

any more, and that her honour, marriage, and love didn't depend upon a

wretched name or so up or down, but upon himself and his heart. She

restrained her tears, but she continued to be troubled and silent the

whole of the evening.

Now let no one call our good Firmian over jealous or suspicious when,

having just got well rid of one wretched sacrilegious robber of

marriage honour, the Venner, the idea of a volcanic eruption which

might throw stones and ashes all over a great tract of his life

suddenly occurs to him; what if his friend Stiefel should be really (as

it almost seems) falling in love with his wife, in all innocence,

himself. His whole behaviour from the very beginning--his attentions on

the wedding-day, his constant visits, and even his exasperation with

the Venner that very day, and his warm feeling and sympathy on the

occasion altogether, all these were the separate parts of a pretty

coherent whole, and seemed to indicate a deep and growing affection,

thoroughly honourable, no doubt, and unperceived by himself. Whether or

not a spark of it had jumped off into Lenette's heart, and was

smouldering there, it was impossible as yet to determine; but true and

good as he knew his wife and his friend to be, his hopes and his fears

could not but be pretty equally balanced.

Dear hero! Do continue to be one! Destiny, as I see more and more

clearly as time goes on, seems to have made up her mind gradually to

join the separate pieces of a drill machine together with which to

pierce through the diamond of thy stoicism; or else by slow degrees to

build and fashion English scraping and singeing machines (made out of

poverty, household worries, law suits, and jealousy) to scrape and

singe away from thee every rough and ill-placed fibre, as if you were a

web of finest English cloth. If this should be so, do but come out of

the mill as splendid a piece of English stuff as was ever brought to

the Leipzig cloth and book fair, and you will be glorious indeed.

CHAPTER IV.

A MATRIMONIAL PARTIE À LA GUERRE--LETTER TO THAT HAIR COLLECTOR,

THE VENNER--SELF-DECEPTIONS--ADAM'S MARRIAGE SERMON--SHADOWING

AND OVER-SHADOWING.

There is nothing which I observe and note down with more scrupulous and

copious accuracy than two equinoctial periods, the matrimonial equinox

when, after the honeymoon, the sun enters the constellation Libra (or

the balance), and the meteorologic vernal equinox; because, by

observing the weather which prevails at these two periods, I am enabled

to prognosticate with surprising accuracy the nature of that which will

characterise the succeeding season. I consider the first storm of the

spring to be always the most important, and similarly, the first

matrimonial storm; the others all come from the same quarter.

When the Schulrath was gone, the poor's advocate took his sulky

house-goddess into his arms, and plied her with every conceivable

method of proof; with proofs derived from immemorial hearsay,

partial proofs, evidential proof, proof on oath, and by logical

deduction--every kind of proof wherewith one can harden one's own

heart, or soften another's.

But the whole of the evidence he adduced was useless. He might just as

well have been embracing the cold hard angel at the baptismal font in

the principal church, his own angel remained quite as cold and silent.

Furboots had been the tourniquet which stopped the hemorrhage of

Lenette's open, streaming artery; but his departure had taken the

German tinder stopping from her eyes and now they streamed unstanched.

Siebenkæs went often to the window, and up and down in the room, that

she might not see that he was following her example, and that her

sorrow, little reasonable as it was, infected him by sympathy. We can

more easily bear, and forgive pain of our own causing than of

another's. All the following day there was an unendurable silence in

the house. This was the very first of the beds of the matrimonial

nursery-garden in which a seed of the apple of discord had been

planted, and as yet not the faintest rustle of its sap was audible. It

is not in the first domestic squabble, not till the fourth, tenth,

ten-thousandth, that a woman can keep perfect silence with her tongue,

yet make a tremendous noise with her body, and turn every chair which

she shoves about, and every reel of cotton which she lets fall, into a

language-machine and fountain of speech, and play her _instrumental_

music all the louder, because her _vocal_ parts are counting their

rests. LENETTE WENDELINE moved everything and said everything, as

softly as if her liege lord had the gout and was lying with cramped

foot pressed in agony against the trembling bottom board of his bed.

When the third day of this came on, he was vexed and annoyed--and he

had reason. I beg to say that, for my own part, I should be quite

prepared to quarrel with my own wife, if I had one--ay, and to do it

with a will--and that to some purpose, and to bandy words with her, as

well as letters (though I should prefer the former). But there's one

thing which would kill me outright, and that would be her keeping up a

long, dreary, tearful sulking, a thing which, like the sirocco wind,

ends by blowing out all a man's lights, thoughts, and joys, and at

length his life itself. Just as we all of us, rather _like_ a violent

thunderstorm in summer, and think it refreshing rather than otherwise

in itself--and yet consider it a cursed nuisance on the whole, because

it's sure to be followed by some days of dreary wet weather. Siebenkæs

was all the more vexed on this occasion, because he was a man who

scarcely ever was vexed. As other jurists have reckoned themselves

among men exempt from torture, so Siebenkæs had long ago fortified

_himself_ against grief and care, those torture racks of the soul (by

the help of Epictetus), as effectually as he had the infanticide

against bodily torture.

The Jews hold that when Messiah comes, hell will be joined on to

paradise, so as to make a bigger dancing saloon. And all the year long,

Siebenkæs occupied himself in building and adding on his torture

chambers and schools of suffering to the entertainment halls of his

bagatelle, so as to have more room to perform his ballets.

He often said a medal should be struck for any citizen who should be

three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and

fifty-five seconds, without either growling or snarling.

He wouldn't have got that medal himself in the year 1785. On the third

day, the Saturday, he was so wild at his wife's speechlessness, that he

was wilder still with that kill-joy of an Everard. For, of course, that

minnesinger, might come in again at any moment, bringing in his company

the goddess of discord (who, as directrix and ambassadress, performs

such important poetical functions in Voltaire's Henriade), and

introducing her into the homely "Volkslied" of an advocate, by way of a

_dea ex machina_ to unloose the matrimonial knot, and tie a fresh one

with the Venner. Siebenkæs accordingly wrote him the following

academic-controversial document.

"May it please your Lordship,

"I take the liberty to lay before your Lordship in this little memorial

my humble petition,

"That you will be pleased to stay at home, and spare me the honour of

your visits.

"Should your Lordship find it necessary to become possessed of a

certain quantity of my wife's hair--the undersigned hereby undertakes

to cut and deliver the same himself. In the event of your Lordship's

being minded to exercise a _jus compascui_, or right of free common and

pasturage in my premises, and appearing therein in person, I shall

embrace with much pleasure the opportunity then afforded me of plucking

as many of your Lordship's own hairs as may be requisite to constitute

a souvenir out of your Lordship's head, by the roots, like monthly

radishes, with my own hands. While I was in Nürnberg, I used often to

go and dine in the neighbouring villages (against the will of the

authorities) with a fine old PRUGEL KNECHT,[27] _i. e_. with a private

tutor, who had towzed out and excerpted from the heads of three little

slips of nobility, while he was giving them their lessons, enough silky

hair to make him a handsome mouse-coloured bag-wig, which the man most

probably wears to this day. His motive in thus applying himself to the

production of silk, or rather, his reason for divesting these little

heads of their exterior foliage, was, that his own beams might the more

effectually ripen the fruit within, as, for similar reasons, it is

usual to remove leaves from the vines in August.

"I have the honour to remain, &c."

I shall be very sorry if I cannot manage to get the reader to

understand that the advocate wrote this biting letter without the

slightest bitterness of feeling. He had read the brilliant satirical

writings of the three merry wise men of London, Butler, Swift, and

Sterne--those three bodies of the satirical giant, Geryon, or three

furies (Parcæ) of the foolish--to such an extent that, as their

disciple and follower, he never thought whether it was a biting letter

or not. In his admiration of the artistic beauties of his composition,

he lost sight of its meaning; and indeed, if a stinging speech were

made to himself, he would think nothing of the length of its prickles

in comparison with its form and shape. I need merely instance his

'Selection from the Devil's Papers;' the satirical poison bubbles

and venomous prickles so frequent in that work came from his pen and

ink--_i. e_. his head only, not from his heart.

I take the opportunity of begging the reader always to infuse the very

soul of gentleness and kindness into every word and tone he utters

(because it is our words more than our deeds which make people angry),

and, more particularly still, into every page he writes. For, truly,

even if your correspondents have forgiven you an epistolary _pereat_

long ago, yet the old leaven of ill-will ferments anew, if the

sorrel-leaf of a letter containing it chances to come to hand again. We

may, of course, on the other hand, reckon upon a similar immortality

for a piece of epistolary kindness. Truly, though a long, cutting

December wind had made my heart stiff and immoveable to everything in

the shape of kindly feeling for one who, once on a time, used to write

me absolute Epistles of St. John, tender pastorals of letters, what

would it matter, if I should but chance to turn up these old letters in

my letter-treasury of bundles and packets of letters?

The sight of the beloved handwriting, the welcome seal, the kind,

endearing words, and the pieces of paper where so many a pleasure found

space to sport and play, would cast the sunshine of the old affection

upon the frozen heart once more; it would reopen at the memory of the

dear old time, as some flower that has closed reopens when a sunbeam

lights upon it, and its only thought--ay, were it but the day before

yesterday that it had conceived itself mortally offended--would be,

"Ah! I was too hard upon him (or her) after all." Many of the saints in

the first century used to drive devils out of the possessed, in a

somewhat similar way, merely by means of letters.

Furboots came, as if he had been sent for, on the Saturday evening,

like a Jewish Sabbath. I have often seen a guest serve as cement

or hefting powder to two better halves in a state of fracture,

because shame and necessity compelled them to speak and behave

kindly to each other, at all events while the guest was there.

Every husband should be provided with two or three visitors

of this sort, to come in when he's suffering from an attack of

wife-possessed-too-long-with-the-devil-of-dumbness; as long as the

people are there, at all events, she must speak, and take the iron

thief-apple of silence--which grows on the same stalk as the apple of

discord--out of her mouth.

The Schulrath stood up before Lenette Wendeline as if she were one of

his school girls, and asked her if she had borne this first cross of

her married life patiently, and like a worthy sister in suffering of

the patriarch Job. She drooped her big eyes, wound a thread the length

of a finger into a white snowball, and breathed deeper. Her husband

answered for her: "I was her brother in affliction, and bore the

cross-bar of the burden--I without a murmur, she without a murmur. In

the twelfth century, the heap of ashes on which Job endured his

sufferings used still to be shown. Our two chairs are our heaps of

ashes; there they are still to be seen!"

"Good woman!" said Stiefel, in the softest pianissimo of his pedal

reed-stop of a masculine voice, and laid his snow-white hand on the

soft, raven hair upon her forehead. Siebenkæs heard a multiplying

sympathetic echo of these words in his heart, and laid his arm on

Lenette's shoulders, who was blushing with pleasure at the honour

conferred upon her by this kindness of the man in office. Her husband

softly pressed her left side to his right, and said:--

"She is good, indeed; she is gentle, and quiet, and patient, and only

too industrious. If the whole tag, rag and bobtail of Hell's army,

in the shape of the Venner, had only not advanced upon our little

summer-house of happiness, to knock its roof off, we should have lived

happy in it for many a day, Mr. Stiefel, far into the winter of our

lives. For my Lenette is good, and _too_ good for me and for many

another man." Here Stiefel, in his emotion, surrounded that hand of

hers which had the skein of thread in it, at the seat of the pulse with

his fine fingers--the empty hand being in her husband's possession--and

the Wound Water of our pain, the great drops of which trickled from her

drooped eyes down her cheeks, where her imprisoned hands could not wipe

them away, made the two male hearts very tender. And besides, her

husband could never praise any one long without his eyes overflowing.

He went on, faster, "Yes, she might have been very comfortable and

well-off with me, but that my mother's money is kept back from me in

this terrible way. But, even for all that, I should have made her happy

without the money, and she me--we never had a word, never a single

unhappy moment--now had we, Lenette? nothing but peace and love, till

the Venner came. He has taken a good deal from _us_!"

The Schulrath raised his clenched fist in wrath, and exclaimed, sawing

the air with it, "You child of hell! you robber-captain and filibuster!

You silken Catiline and mischief-maker! Does it ever strike you that

you'll have to answer for this and your other pranks one day? Mr.

Siebenkæs, this, at all events, I _do_ expect of you, that if ever he

comes here again asking for hair, you will turn him out by the hair of

his own head, or hit this fur-maggot (as you call him yourself) across

the shoulders with a boot-jack, and squeeze his hand with a pair of

pincers--in fact, the long and the short of it is, _I will not_ have

him come here any more."

And here Siebenkæs, to cool down his own emotions and other people's,

mentioned the fact of his having already taken steps in the matter, and

served the necessary letter of inhibition upon the Venner. Stiefel

clucked his tongue in a joyful manner, and nodded his head approvingly.

He considered any person high in office to be a vicegerent of Christ on

earth, a count to be a demigod, and an emperor as a whole one;--but a

single one of the deadly sins committed by any of them all would at

once cost them the whole of his deferential good will,--and a slip in

Latin grammar, though committed by a head crowned with gold, he would

at once have done battle with in a whole Latin Easter programme. Men of

"the world have straight bodies and crooked souls; scholars often have

neither the one nor the other. The last of Lenette's clouds cleared

away when she heard that a paper escarpment and _cheval de frise_

against the Venner had been constructed at her door. "Then he will

trouble me no more! Thanks be to Heaven! He goes about lying and

deceiving everyone he comes across."[28]

"We don't employ these words, Madame Siebenkæs, if we care to speak

grammatically," said Stiefel; "irregular verbs such as '_kriechen_,

_trügen_, _lügen_,' though they are _verba anomala_, and as such have

'_kroch_, _log_, _trog_,' and so on in the imperfect tense, are still

always inflected quite regularly in the present by the best German

grammarians--although the poets permit themselves a poetical license in

such cases, as, I am sorry to say, they do in most others--and

therefore we say, if we care to be grammatically correct, '_lügt_,

_trügt_, _kriecht_,' &c., at the present day, that is."

"Don't find fault with my dear Augspurger's Lutheran inflections," said

Siebenkæs; "there's something touching to me about these irregular

verbs of hers; they are the Schmalkaldian article of the Augspurg

confession." Here she drew her husband's ear softly down to her lips

and said, "What would you like me to get for supper? Tell the gentleman

that you know I mean no offence, whatever words I use. And I wish you

would ask his reverence, Firmian dear, when I'm out of the room,

whether our marriage is really all right according to the Bible." He

asked this question on the spot. Stiefel answered it deliberately as

follows:--"We have only to look at the case of Leah, who was conducted

to Jacob's tent under the pseudonym of Rachel on her marriage night,

and whose marriage the Bible holds to be perfectly valid. Is it names

or bodies that exchange rings? And can a name fulfil the marriage vow?"

Lenette answered these questions, and spoke her thanks for this

consistorial decision by a bashful glance of restored content and a

beaming face upturned towards him. She went to the kitchen, but kept

constantly coming back and snuffing the candle, which was on the table

at which the two gentlemen sat talking; and probably nobody, except the

advocate and I, will consider this to be any indication of a more than

ordinary liking for Stiefel. The latter always took the snuffers from

her, saying "it was _his_ duty." Siebenkæs clearly perceived that both

the apples of his eyes revolved, satellite-fashion, round his own

planet, Lenette; but he did not grudge the Latin knight his little

glimpse of an age of chivalry thus sweetened by a Dulcinea; like most

men, he could far sooner pardon the rival lover than the unfaithful

fair; women, on the other hand, hate the rival more than the unfaithful

lover. Moreover, he knew perfectly that Stiefel had not the least idea

himself whom or what he cared for or sighed for, and that he was a far

better hand at reviewing schoolmen and authors than himself. For

instance, his own anger he called professional zeal; his pride, the

dignity due to his office; his passions, sins of weakness; and on this

occasion love appeared to him disguised as mere philanthropy. The arch

of Lenette's troth was firmly finished off in the keystone of religion,

and the Venner's assault upon it had not shaken this sacred masonry in

the slightest degree.

At this juncture the postman stumped up stairs with a new constellation

which he set in their serene family sky, namely, the following letter

from Leibgeber.

"Bayreuth, 21 Sept., 1785.

"My dear Brother, Cousin, and Uncle,

Father and Son!

"For the two auricles and the two ventricles of thy heart constitute my

entire genealogical tree:--as Adam, when he went for a walk, carried

about with him the whole of his blood relations that were to be, and

his long line of descendants--which is not wholly unreeled and wound up

even at this day--till he became a father, and his wife bare a child. I

wish to goodness I had been the first Adam! Siebenkæs, I do adjure you,

let me, let me, follow up this idea which has struck me and taken hold

of me with such power; let me not write a word in this letter that does

not add a touch to the three-quarter-length portrait which I shall draw

of myself as the first father of mankind!

"Men of learning are much mistaken who suppose my reason for wishing I

were Adam to be, that Puffendorf and many other writers very properly

award me the whole of this earth as a kind of European colony in the

India of the universe, as my _patrimonium Petri_, _Pauli_, _Judæ_ and

the rest of the Apostles; inasmuch as I, being the sole Adam and man,

and consequently the first and last of universal monarchs (although as

yet without any subjects), might of course lay claim to the entire

earth. It might occur to the pope, indeed (he being holy father, though

not our first father), to make a similar claim, or rather it did occur

to him some centuries ago, when he constituted himself the guardian and

the heir of all the countries of the earth, and indeed made bold to set

two other crowns on the top of his earthly one, a crown of heaven and a

crown of hell.

"How small a thing it is that I desire! All that I wish I had been the

old Adam (in fact, the oldest Adam) for, is merely that I might have

strolled up and down with Eve among the espaliers of Eden on our

marriage night, in our aprons and beasts' skins, and delivered an

address in Hebrew to the mother of all living.

"Before commencing my address I beg to observe that, while I was yet

unfallen, it fortunately occurred to me to note down the more important

heads of my universal knowledge. For I had, in my condition of

innocence, a perfect and intuitive knowledge of all the sciences, of

history, both universal and literary, the various criminal and other

codes of law, all the dead languages as well as the living, and was a

kind of live Pindus and Pegasus, a portable Lodge of Light and learned

society, a pocket university, and miniature golden _Siècle de Louis

XIV_. Considering what my mental powers were at that juncture it is a

miracle (and what's more, a very lucky job) that in my leisure moments

I put down the cream of my universal knowledge on paper, because when I

subsequently fell, and became simple and ignorant, I had these

excerpts, or _Catalogues raisonnés_, of my former wisdom by me, so that

I could refer to them.

"'Virgin!' (it was thus that the sermon delivered outside Paradise

commenced) 'it is true we are the first of parents, and are minded to

originate all the subsequent parents; though all that you think about

is sticking your spoon into a forbidden apple. However, I, being a man

and protoplast, reflect and ponder, and as we walk to and fro, I shall

undertake the office of preacher of the sermon on this, the occasion of

our entering into the bonds of wedlock (not having as yet,

unfortunately, begotten anybody else to do it), and, in a brief wedding

exhortation, direct your attention to the doubts affecting and the

reasons deciding, the protoplasts, or the first parents and first of

wedded couples (that is to say, you and me), in the act of reflecting

and considering, and how--

"'In the first place, they consider the reasons why they should not

people the earth, but emigrate this very day, the one into the old

world, the other into the new; and

"'In the second place, the reasons why they should do nothing of the

kind, but marry.

"'After which a short elench, or _usus epanorthoticus_, will be

adduced, and will conclude the lecture and the night.'

IN THE FIRST PLACE

"'My dearly beloved!

"'Here, in my sheepskin, as I appear before you, grave, thoughtful, and

wise, it is nevertheless the fact that I am full to the very brim

of--not so much follies as _fools_, with a good many wise men stuck in

here and there between them by way of parentheses. I am of short

stature, it is true, and the ocean[29] came a good deal above my

ancles, and besprinkled my new beasts' skin; and yet, as I walk up and

down here, I am girt about with a seed cloth, containing the seeds of

all nations, and carrying the repertory of the whole human race, an

entire world in miniature and _orbis pictus_, round my middle like a

pedlar's stock in trade. For BONNET, who is in me among the rest, will

sit down at his desk (when he comes out), and prove that they are all

one inside the other, like a nest of boxes or a set of parentheses,

that the father contains the son, that the grandfather contains them

both, the great-grandfather consequently the grandfather and all the

contents of him, the great-great-grandfather the great-grandfather and

the contents of his contents and all his episodes, all sitting waiting

one inside the other. Are there not then here embodied in thy

bridegroom--this is a point, dear bride, which cannot be made _too_

intelligible to you--all religious sects, excepting the Preadamites,

but including the Adamites,[30] and all giants, the great Christopher

himself among them every individual of every nation of all the

earth--all the shiploads of negroes destined for America, and the

packets marked with red containing the soldiers promised by England to

Anspach and Bayreuth? Eve, am I not, as I stand here before you, a

whole Jews'-quarter--a Louvre of all the crowned heads of the

earth--since I can bring them all into existence if I please, and if I

am not induced by this first head of my discourse to refrain from doing

so? You will admire me, and yet laugh at me at the same time if you but

look at me well, lay your hand on my shoulder, and say to yourself:

"Now, in this man and protoplast are contained all mankind, all the

learned faculties, all schools of philosophy, and of sewing and

spinning, cheek by jowl in peace and harmony, the highest and noblest

royal families and princely houses (though not yet sorted out from

among the common ship's company), all free imperial orders of

knighthood, packed higgledy-piggledy with their vassals, cottiers,

and tenants, it is true--monasteries and nunneries next door to each

other--barracks and members of Parliament, to say nothing of cathedral

chapters, with all their provosts, deans, priors, sub-priors, and

canons! What a man! What an Anak!" you will add. You are right, dear, I

am indeed--the very nest dollar of the human coin-cabinet, the

universal court of assembly of all judicatures, with all the members of

all assemblies, not one out of its place, the walking _corpus juris_ of

all civil, canon, criminal, feudal, and municipal law. Haven't I

Meusel's 'Learned Germany' and Jöcher's 'Scholastic Lexicon' within me

all complete, and Jöcher and Meusel themselves, to say nothing of their

supplementary volumes? I wish I could just let you see Cain--who, if

head second of this discourse should determine me, would be our first

offshoot and sucker, our Prince of Wales, Calabria, Asturias and the

Brazils. You would see, if he were transparent--as I believe him to

be--how he contains all the rest, one inside the other, like beer

glasses--all œcumenical councils, inquisitions, and propaganda, and

the devil and his grandmother. But, loveliest, thou didst not write

down any of thy _scientia media_ before thy fall, as I did, and

consequently thou starest into the future as blind as a bat. I,

however, who see into it quite clearly, am enabled by my chrestomathy

to perceive that, where other men beget perhaps some ten fools, I shall

beget whole millions of tens, and units into the bargain, seeing that

the Bohemians, Parisians, Viennese, Leipzigers, Bayreuthers, Hofians,

Dublinese, Kuhschnappelers (and their wives and daughters over and

above) have all got to come into existence through me, and that in

every million of them there will always be at least five hundred who

neither have, nor will listen to, reason. Duenna, as yet you know

little of the human race, but two in fact, for the serpent is not one;

but I know what sort of race I am going to produce, and that in opening

my _limbus infantum_, I open at the same time a Bedlam. By heaven, I

weep and lament when I merely peep in between the leaves of the

centuries in their long course, and see nothing there but gouts of

gore, and a congeries of idiots--when I think of the trouble and pain

to be undergone before a century shall learn to write a legible hand, a

hand even as good as a minister's or an elephant's trunk--before poor

humanity gets through its dame's school, and private tutors, and French

governesses, so as to be fit for Latin grammar schools, public schools,

Jesuit seminaries, and next for fencing classes, dancing classes,

dogmatic and clinical courses. By old Harry, I feel hot. Nobody will

think of you as the brood-hen of the coming flock of starlings, as the

spawning codfish in whom Leuwenhack will count 9½ millions of eggs; not

you, my little Eve, but your husband, will get all the blame, who

should have known better, and rather begotten nothing than such a

rabble of thieves and robbers, crowned emperors on the Roman throne,

and vicegerents on the Roman chair, the former of whom will call

themselves after Antoninus and Cæsar, the latter after Christus and

Petrus, and among whom there are men whose thrones shall be Lüneburg

torture chairs for the human race, if not the converse of a Place de

Grève, where the masses shall be put to death, and the single

individual feted and amused.[31] And I shall be taken to task on

account of Borgia, Pizarro, St. Dominic, and Potemkin. Even supposing I

should manage to evade being blamed for black exceptions such as these,

I should be obliged to admit that my descendants really cannot get

through the space of half-an-hour without either thinking or doing

something foolish, that the war of giants, waged in them by their

passions, is never broken by a peace, seldom even by a truce; that the

greatest of all man's faults is that he has such a number of little

ones; that his conscience serves for scarcely anything but _hating his

neighbours and being morbidly sensitive to their transgressions_; that

he never leaves off evil ways till he is on his deathbed; that, he

learns and loves the language of virtue, but is at enmity with the

virtuous--just as the English employ French language teachers, though

they detest the French themselves. Eve, Eve, we shall have little to

congratulate ourselves upon if we marry; Adam means in the original

"red earth," and truly my cheeks will consist entirely thereof, and

will blush scarlet at the mere thought of the indescribable and

unparalleled conceit and vanity of our great-grandchildren, increasing

as the centuries go on. Nobody will tweak _himself_ by the nose--unless

perhaps when he is shaving. Critics will set themselves up above

authors, authors above critics--Heimlicher von Blaise will give his

hand to be kissed by orphans; ladies theirs to be kissed by all and

sundry; mighty ones the embroidered hems of their garments. Eve, I had

only got as far on with my prophetic extracts from the world's history

as the sixth century, when you bit the apple under the tree, and I,

like a fool, did as you did, and everything slipped out of my head: God

only knows what sort of a set the fools and foolesses of the subsequent

centuries may turn out to be. Virgin, wilt thou now put into action thy

_Sternocleidomastoideum_, as Sömmering styles the muscle which nods the

head, and so express your "yes" when I put to you the question, "Wilt

thou have the marriage-preacher to thy wedded husband?"

"'You will no doubt reply, let us first hear the second head of the

discourse, in which the subject is considered from another point of

view. And indeed, dearly beloved, we had almost forgotten that we must

proceed to the

SECOND PLACE,

and consider the reasons which may persuade first parents to become

such, and to marry, and serve Destiny in the capacity of sewing and

spinning machines of linseed, hemp, flax, and tow, to be wound by her

in endless networks and coils around the earthly sphere. My strongest

reason, and, I trust, yours also, is the thought of the Day of

Judgment. For, in the event of our becoming the _entrepreneurs_ of the

human race, I shall see all my descendants, when they ascend from the

calcined earth like vapour, at the last day, into the nearest planet,

and fall into order for the last review; and among this harvest of

children and grandchildren, I shall hit upon a few sensible people with

whom one may be able to exchange a rational word or two--men whose

whole lives were passed, as well as lost, amid thunder and lightning

(as according to the Romans those whom the gods loved were killed by

lightning), and who never closed their eyes or their ears, however wild

the storm. I see the four heathen evangelists among them too, Socrates,

Cato, Epictetus, and Antoninus, men who went through the world, using

their voices like fire-engine pipes, two hundred feet long, to save

people from being burnt out of house and home by the fire of their own

passions, sluicing them all over with pure, cold, Alp-water. And there

can be no doubt after all, that I may really be the arch-papa, and you

the arch-mamma, of some very great and celebrated people, that's to

say, if we choose. I tell you, Eve, that I have it here in black and

white among my excerpts and collectanea that I shall be the forefather,

ancestor, and Bethlehem of an Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Newton,

Rousseau, Goethe, Kant, Leibnitz, people, take them for all in all, who

are as able thinkers as their protoplast himself, if not abler. Eve,

thou active and important member of the fruit-bearing jointstock

company, or productive class of the state (consisting of thyself and

this marriage-preacher), I assure you I expect to pass a few hours of

exquisite enjoyment when on that neighbouring star I survey in a

cursory manner that classic concourse newly risen from the dead, and at

length kneel down, and cry, "Good morning, my children! Such of you as

are Jews were wont to utter an ejaculatory prayer when ye met a wise

man; but what such utterance would suffice for me, now that I behold

all the wise and all the faculties at once, all of them my own blood

relations too, who amid the wolfish hunger of their desires have

stedfastly refrained from forbidden apples, pears, and pine apples,

and, deep as their thirst for wisdom might be, committed no

orchard-robbery on the tree of knowledge, though their first parents

seized upon the forbidden fruit, although they had never known what

hunger was, and upon the tree of knowledge, although they possessed all

knowledge, except knowledge of the serpent nature." And then I shall

arise from the ground, pass into the angelic crowd, fall on the bosom

of some distinguished descendant, and, throwing my arms around him,

say, "Thou, true, good, contented-minded, gentle son! If I could just

have shown _thee_ only, sitting in thy brood-cell, to my Eve, the

queen-bee of this great swarm here present, at the time when I was

delivering the second head of my marriage sermon, I'm sure she would

have listened to reason, and given a favourable answer.'"

"And thou, Siebenkæs, art that same, true, good son, and thou restest

ever on the warm, heaving breast of

"Thy Friend.

"_Postscript and Clausula Salutaris_.

"Please to forgive me this merry private ball and witches' dance upon

cheap and nasty letter-paper, notwithstanding that you are

unfortunately an infinitesimal fractional part of the German race, and

as such, can't be expected either to stand, or to understand, such a

dance of ideas. This is why I never print anything for the unwieldy

German intellect; entire sheets which I have spawned full of playful

idea-fishes of this sort I consign at once to regions where such

productions do not usually arrive till they attain the evening of their

days, having previously exercised the right of transit through the

booksellers' shops. I was eight days in Hof, and am at present living a

retired life at Bayreuth; in both of these towns I have made faces,

that is, other people's profiles; but most of the heads which sat or

stood to my scissors opined that all was not quite right in mine. Tell

me the real truth of the matter; it's not altogether a matter of

indifference to me, because if I should turn out not to be quite 'all

there,' I should be incapable of devising my property by will, or of

exercising various civil functions.

"In conclusion, I send a thousand kind remembrances and kisses to your

dear, good Lenette, and my compliments to Herr Schulrath Stiefel, and

will you please ask him if he is any relation to Magister Stiefel, the

rector of Holzdorf and Lochau (in Wittemberg), who prophesied

(incorrectly, as I consider) that the end of the world would take place

on the 1st January, 1533, at 8 o'clock in the morning, and lived to die

in his own bed after all. I also send, for you and the 'Advertiser,' a

couple of programmes of Professor Lang's of this place, relative to the

General Superintendent of Bayreuth, and one of Dr. Frank's of Pavia.

There is a very charming young lady, exceedingly clever and

intellectual, living here at the Sun Hotel (she is in the front rooms,

and I in the back). She has been very much pleased with me and my face,

I am happy to tell you, seeing how exactly you and I are alike, the

only difference between us being my lame foot. So that the things I

pride myself upon in ladies' society are my likeness to you and my

weaknesses. Unless I have been misinformed, this lady is a poor niece

of your old uncle's with the broken glass wig, and is being brought up

at his expense, and destined for a marriage with some Kuhschnappeler of

the upper ten thousand. Perhaps she may soon be forwarded to you,

entered in the way-bill as bridegroom's effects.

"The above is my oldest news, but my newest news, namely your own self,

I shall not expect to arrive here at Bayreuth till I and the spring get

back to it together (for the day after to-morrow I am off to meet it in

Italy), and we, I and the spring, together beautify the world to such a

degree that you will certainly enjoy a happy time of it in Bayreuth,

the houses and the hills of that place being so particularly charming.

And so, fare thee somewhat well."

They all felt certain that the Kuhschnappeler of rank for whom the

Heimlicher's niece was being brought up could be none other than the

Venner Rosa, whose little burnt-down stump of a heart--what was left of

it after being hitherto made use of to set fire to the bosoms of female

humanity in general (as the lamp in a smoking-room serves to kindle the

pipes of the collective frequenters thereof)--would be the marriage

torch to light her to her new home.

As there were three heavens in this letter--one for each of the

party--kind remembrances for Lenette, the programmes for Peltzstiefel,

the letter itself for Siebenkæs--I shouldn't have been astonished if

the terzetto of them had danced for joy. The Schulrath, intoxicated

with delight--for the glad blood rose to his sober head--opened the

papers sent him upon the square patterned supper-cloth (which was laid

already), and hungrily began to devour his three printed "relishes

before supper," and literary petits soupers, upon the tin plate without

even saying grace, until an invitation to stay and have some supper

reminded him that he must be off. But before leaving, he petitioned

that, by way of fee for having acted as middleman and court of

arbitration between them, or as an alkali to promote the blending of

his oil with her water--he might have a new profile of Lenette. The old

one cut out by Leibgeber (which the letter brought to his

recollection), and which, as we may remember, Leibgeber let him have,

happened to have been put into the pocket of his dressing-gown and sent

to the wash with it (being of much the same colour, moreover). "It

shall be put on the stocks to-night," said Siebenkæs.

When the Schulrath was going, as he could see that the ring upon

Lenette's finger didn't squeeze it so uncomfortably as it had done (and

gave _himself_ credit for having been the means of filing it smoother

and padding it softer), he shook her hand with much warmth, and said--

"I shall always be delighted to come whenever there's the slightest

thing the matter with you two charming people."

Lenette answered, "Oh yes, do come very often."

And Siebenkæs added, "The oftener the better."

And yet, when he had gone, the ring seemed to be not quite so

comfortable again, and medical students who may be working at

psychology may be a little surprised that during supper the advocate

said very little to his wife, and she very little to him. The reason

was that he had Leibgeber's letter lying by his plate in the place

where the bread normally is, and the image of his beloved friend shone

bright before his mental vision from Bayreuth all athwart the far misty

darkness between--their first happy meeting to come floated magically

before him. Hope shot down a pure clearing ray into the dark mephitic

cave where he was panting and toiling now--and the coming spring stood

like some cathedral tower all hung with lamps lofty and bright in the

distance, beaming through the dark night sky.

At length he "came to himself," _i. e_. to his wife; the strong image

of Leibgeber had buoyed him up from the sharp stones which strewed the

present; the dear old friend, who had clipped out the bride's profile

up in the choir on the wedding-day, and been with them in the early

weeks of their honeymoon, seemed to fling a chain of flower-wreaths

about him and draw him closer to the silent form by his side. "Well

darling, and how are you getting on?" he said, awaking from his reverie

and taking her hand, now that all was peace again between them. She

had, however, the feminine peculiarity or foible, habit at all events,

of being much quicker to show that she was vexed than that her anger

was over; of, at all events, being slow to show the latter; and of

commencing a reconsideration of all the matters in dispute at the very

moment that amends have been made and accepted, and pardon begged and

granted. There are very few married women indeed who will put their

hand into their husbands', and say "There, I'm good again," without a

very considerable hesitation and delay; unmarried women are much more

ready to do it. Wendeline _did_ hold hers out, but did it too coldly,

and drew it away again in a great hurry, to take up the table-cloth,

which she asked him to help her to smooth and fold up. He did this

smilingly--she gravely giving her whole attention to the process of

folding the long white parallelogram into exact squares--and at length,

when the last and thickest square was arrived at, he held it fast

there--she pulled, trying to look very serious--he looked at her very

fondly and tenderly--she couldn't help smiling at this and then he took

the tablecloth from her, pressed it and himself with it to her heart,

and said, in her arms, "Little thief! how can you be so naughty to your

old ragamuffin of a Siebenkæs, or whatever his name may be?" And now

the rainbow of a brighter future appeared shining above the fast ebbing

flood which had risen as high as their hearts so lately---- But, my

dears, rainbows now-a-days very often mean just the reverse of what the

first was said to signify.

The prize he awarded to his queen of the rose-feast of the heart was to

ask her to let him take a profile of her pretty face, that Peltzstiefel

might find a joy and a present waiting for him on the morrow. I think I

shall just trace an outline of his outline-tracing for people of taste

in this place; but I must stipulate that nobody is to expect a pen

to be a painter's brush--or a painter's brush to be an engraver's

style--or an engraver's style a flower anther, generating generation

upon generation of lilies and roses.

The advocate borrowed a drawing-board, viz. the façade of a new

pigeon-house, from Fecht the cobbler. Lenette's shoulder fitted into

the oval portal of it as a clasp-knife does into its handle; a sheet of

white paper was tacked on to the board--her pretty, soft head was

pressed on the stiff paper--he applied, with much care and self

restraint, his pencil at the upper part of the brow, difficult as it

was to catch the shadow in such immediate proximity to the reality--and

went slowly down the beautiful, flowery declivity all roses and lilies.

But little or nothing came of it; the _back_ part of the head was

pretty good. His eyes would keep turning away from his work to the

sitter, so that he drew as vilely as a box-painter.

"Wendeline, your head isn't still a moment," he said. And indeed her

face, an well as her brain-fibres, shook by reason of the heightened

beat of her pulse and the quickening of her breathing; while, on the

other hand, his pencil stumbled when it came to the delicate _basso

relievo_ of her little nose, fell into the cleft at her lips, and

stranded on the shoal of her chin. He kissed those lips which he

couldn't draw, and which she always had either too much open or too

tightly closed, and brought a shaving-glass and said, "See, haven't you

got more faces than Janus, or any Indian god? The Schulrath will think

you were making faces, and I copying them. Look, here's where you

moved, and I sprung after you like a chamois; the effect of the jump

is, that the upper part of the face sticks out before the lower like a

half mask. Just think how the Schulrath will stare in the morning."

"Try once more, dear; I'll do just as you tell me; I should like it to

be very nice," Lenette said, blushing; and stiffened her neck, and

steadied her soft cheek against the drawing-board. And as her husband

gently glided his drawing ovipositor over her brow like a segment of

some white hemisphere--instead of breathing, he found she was _holding_

her breath this time till she shook again, and till the colour came to

her face.

And here jealousy, like some exploding fire-ship, sent hard fragments

of the wreck of his shattered happiness crashing on a sudden against

his heart.

"Ah!" (he thought) "can it be that she does really love him?" (_i. e._

the Schulrath).

His pencil stood still in the obtuse angle between her nose and her

chin as if under a spell; he heard her let go her pent-up breath; his

pencil made black zigzags at the edge of the paper, and as he stopped

at the closed lips, which nothing warmer than his own, and her morning

prayers, had ever touched, and thought "Must _this_ come upon me too?

must _this_ joy be taken from me like all the rest? And am I drawing up

my bill of divorce and Uriah-letter here with my own very hands?" He

could do no more at it. He took the drawing-board quickly from

her shoulder--fell upon her closed lips--kissed away the pent-up

sigh--pressed the life out of his jealousy between his heart and hers,

and said--

"I can't do it till to-morrow, Lenette! Don't be vexed, darling! Tell

me, are you quite as you used to be in Augspurg? Don't you understand

me? Have you not the slightest idea what I am driving at?"

She answered quite innocently, "Now you will be annoyed, Firmian, I

know, but I really have _not_ the slightest idea."

Then the Goddess of Peace took from the God of Sleep his poppy garland,

and twined it into her own olive wreath and led the wedded pair,

garlanded and reconciled, hand in hand into the glittering, gleaming,

icefields of the land of dreams--the magic shadowy background of the

noisy jarring, shifting day--our camera obscura full of moving

miniature pictures of a world all dwarfed, in which man, like the

Creator, dwells alone with his own creations.

END OF THE PREFACE AND OF THE FIRST BOOK.

The reader will remember that, at the beginning of the preface, I

stated that I succeeded in putting the old merchant into a sweet sleep,

and in providing his daughter with a gladsome feast of tabernacles, in

the shape of the young unopened buds of this, my little cottage-garden

here. But the foul fiend knows how to breeze up a sudden rain squall,

and let it splattering down upon all our loveliest fireworks. I was

only performing a duty in converting myself into a small, pocket

circulating library for a poor lonely thing of a girl, whose father

gave her no chance of a word or two of rational conversation except

with her parrot, and with the family lawyer aforesaid.

The cage of the former was placed near her inkstand and waste-book; and

he acquired from his mistress as much in the shape of German-Italian

as a bookkeeper finds necessary for carrying on his foreign

correspondence. And a parrot being always incited to talkativeness by a

looking-glass in his cage, he and his language-mistress were enabled to

look at themselves in it together. The latter (the family lawyer) I

myself was. But the Captain--for fear of seductive princess-kidnappers

and pirates such as me, and because her mother was dead, and because

she was useful in the business--would let her speak to no man

whomsoever, except in the presence of a third party (viz., himself). So

that it was very seldom any man came to the house, except me; whereas,

a father generally decoys whole museums of insects into his house by

means of a blooming daughter, just as a cherry-tree in blossom near a

window fills a room with wasps and bees. It wasn't exactly everybody

who, when he wanted to speak a rational word with her (_i. e_. one her

father shouldn't hear), could manage to draw the flute stop of his

organ, and then play away for an hour to this Argus till he should

close his hundred green eyes, so that two blue ones might be looked

into. I _did_ manage it, indeed; but the world shall hear what sort of

a psalm of thanksgiving and vote of thanks I was treated to for my

pains.

The old man--who had grown suspicious on account of the length of time

I had remained the evening before--had this evening only _pretended_ to

be asleep, that he might see what I was going to be at. The rapidity

with which he went asleep (the reader no doubt remembers it at the

beginning of the book) ought to have struck me more than it did. I

ought to have reckoned on a contrary state of matters myself, and been

ready with more prefaces in addition to this present one, to serve as

sleeping powders.

The rascally eavesdropper lay in wait till I had made my report on the

two Flower-pieces and the four first chapters of this book. At the end

of the fourth he bounced up as a mole-trap does when one walks on it,

and addressed me from behind with the following harangue of

congratulation--"Has the devil got you by the coat-tails? You must come

here from Berlin, must you, and stuff my daughter's head with all sorts

of atheistical, nonsensical, romantic balderdash and nonsense, till

she'll be of no more use in a shop than----"

"Just listen to one word, Herr Pigtail!" said I quite quietly, taking

him into the next room, where there was neither fire nor light; "just

listen to one single, _half_-word!"

I put my hands upon his shoulders, and said, "Herr Pigtail--for in

Charles the Great's time every officer was so styled, because in those

days the soldiers wore tails, as the women do now--Herr Pigtail, I'm

not going to have a tussle with you to-night, when the old year's going

out and the new year's coming in. I assure you solemnly that I am the

son of the ----,[32] and that I shall never see you more, though you

shall have all the Vienna letters just the same. But I implore you, for

God's sake, to allow your daughter to read. Now-a-days every tradesman

reads--one of whom will be her husband--and every tradesman's wife. Yet

for all this reading, there's still plenty of spinning and cooking

going on; there are shirts in plenty, and fat people in abundance. And

as for _corrupting_ her--why! that's just what a man who reads will

find it most difficult to accomplish in the case of a woman who reads,

and most easy in the case of one who hardly knows her A B C. Let me

entreat you, Captain."

"If you would but just mind your own affairs! What's the girl to

_you_?" was his reply. It was a true harbour of refuge for me that, on

neither of these two evenings, the Christmas Eve or the New Year's, had

I, in the enthusiasm of narration, so much as touched anything of the

daughter's but about a groschen's worth of hair (and that not her own),

which got among my fingers somehow or other, I hardly know how.

It would have been little to have seized her hands, in the fervour of

my biographical enthusiasm it would have been nothing at all; but, as I

have said, I hadn't done it. I had said to myself, "Enjoy a pretty face

as you would a picture, and a female voice as you would a

nightingale's, and don't touch the picture or throttle the bird. What!

must every tulip be out up for salad, and all altar-cloths made into

camisoles?"

Of all truths, the one which we bring ourselves to credit last of all

is that there are certain men whom no amount of truth will convince.

That Herr Pigtail was one of these presently occurred to me, not so

soon as it ought to have done, and I determined that the only sermon I

should preach, to him would be of the jocular and middle-age-Easter

kind.[33] "Not so loud, Herr Pigtail, or mademoiselle will hear every

syllable; you have pinned her, poor butterfly, into your letter book;

but at the great day of judgment I shall accuse you of not having given

her my works to read. I do wish you had only gone on pretending to be

asleep long enough to allow me to tell her the other books of the

history of Kuhschnappel, where Siebenkæs's troubles occur, and his

death, and his marriage. But, mademoiselle, I shall tell my publisher

in Berlin to send you the remaining books of the story the moment they

are in print, fresh out of the press, still all damp, like a morning

newspaper. And now, adieu, Herr Pigtail; may Heaven grant you a new

heart with the new year, and your dear daughter a second heart inside

her own."

The elemental conflict of his and my dissimilar components raged louder

and louder: but I say no more about it--every additional word would

have the appearance of an act of vindictiveness. This, however, I may

at all events say: happy is every daughter who may read my works while

her father is awake (very few such daughters, however, recognise this

truth). Unhappy is every dependent of an Oehrmann, because he will be

starved, as a greyhound is, that he may be the more nimble at running

(I do not mean on the piano with his fingers), as the dancers' children

get nothing to eat that they may spring the better! And fortunate are

all needy persons who have nothing to do with him; because Jacob

Oehrmann gives to everyone just as much moral, as he possesses

mercantile, credit, to which recruit-measure of worth he has been

habituated by his fellow-tradesmen, who measure each other with

yard-measures of metal. The only people who find favour in his sight

are those who are complete paupers, and this because they serve as

pedestals for his charity; for the alms which he distributes in the

name of the town and out of its exchequer, he looks upon as his own.

Peace be with him! At that time I had not taken a part myself in

celebrating the peace-festival of the soul which I have described in

the Fruit-piece of this book, and I had read but little of what I have

there written concerning the year of Jubilee which ought to last as

long as the Long Parliament in our hearts with respect to all our moral

debtors; for if I had I should not even have contradicted Herr Pigtail.

I vexed him, I am sorry to say, once more by my parting speech to his

daughter (for I wished him and her my wishes both together and at once,

so that it might not appear which was for which).

"Herr Pigtail, and mademoiselle, I bid you a long farewell. No more

shall I be able, in elysian evenings, to relate to you any of my

biographies (shorn of the digressions); and the feast days and the

holidays, as well as the eves thereof, will come and will go, but he

who has caused you such vivid emotions will come no more. May fate send

thee books instead of bookmakers, sometimes stir thy dull heart with a

poetic throb, heave thy still breast with tender sighs prophetic of the

future--bring to thy eyes some gentle tear drops, such as an andante

causes to flow, and lead thee on through the hot, toilsome summer days,

not to an after summer, but to a flowery tuneful spring. And so, good

night."

It goes to my heart to part with people; even were it my sworn

hereditary foe: one is going to see him no more. Pauline was anything

but my sworn hereditary foe. Out in the streets there were more

new year well-wishers going their rounds, the watchmen, who were

giving utterance to their good wishes in wind instrumental music and

miserable verse. Stiff, old-fashioned, rude verses always touch me

more--particularly in an appropriate mouth--than your sapless, new

poems, all tricked out with artificial flowers and ice-plants; poetry

altogether wretched is better than the mediocre. I decided upon going

through the town gate; my heart was filled with emotions of very

different kinds--for you see it was only eleven o'clock and the cold

night was full of stars. And it was the last night of the year, and I

didn't want to pass from the old year to the new in sleep, though that

is how I would pass from this life to the next. I resolved to take that

flushed, throbbing heart of mine out of the streets, and to a quieter

company.

Place a man in some waste Sahara desert stretching further than the eye

can reach, and afterwards pen him up into the narrowest of corners, he

will be struck, in both cases, by the same vivid consciousness of his

own individuality--the widest spaces and the narrowest have the same

powerful effect in quickening our perception of our own Ego and of its

relationship. There is nothing, on the whole, oftener forgotten than

that which is what forgets--namely, the forgetter's _self_. Not only do

the mechanical employments of labour and trade always draw men out of

themselves, but the mental effort of study and investigation, also,

renders scholars and philosophers just as deaf and blind to their own

Ego, and its position with respect to other entities--deafer and

blinder even. Nothing is more difficult than to convert an object of

contemplation (which we always _move away_ to a certain distance from

ourselves, and from the mind's eye, so as to bring the latter to bear

on it properly) into an object of sensation, and to feel that the

object is the eye itself. I have often read whole books on the subject

of the Ego, and of printing, right through, until at last I saw, to my

astonishment, that the Ego and the printed letters were before--me so

to speak under my nose.

Let the reader say truly: has he not even at this moment, while I have

been talking, been forgetting that there are letters before him, ay,

and his own Ego into the bargain?

But out where I was, under the twinkling heavens, and on a snow-covered

height, round about which there gleamed a white, frozen plain, my Ego

burst away from its relationships (while in connection with them it was

no more than an attribute, a quality), and it became a personage--a

separate entity. And then I could look upon myself. All marked points

of time--stanzas as it were, or music phrases, of existence--new years'

days for example, and birthdays, lift man high out of and up above the

waves which are round him; he clears the water from his eyes, and looks

about him, and says--"How the current has been carrying me along,

drowning my hearing, and blinding my sight! Those are the waves, down

there, onward, which have been bearing me along, and these, now coming

toward me, when I dip down among them, will whirl me away!"

Without this clear, distinct consciousness of one's Ego, there can be

no freedom, and no calm equanimity amid the crowding elbowing tumult of

the world.

I shall go on with my story. I stood upon an iceberg, but my soul was

all aglow--the cloven moon shone brightly down, and the shadows of the

pine-trees about me lay, like dismembered limbs of the night, black

upon the lily ground of snow. Away, some distance from me, a man seemed

to be kneeling motionless on the ground.

And now 12 o'clock struck, and 1794, year of war and tumult, fell,

with all its rivers of blood, into the ocean of eternity; the booming

after-tone of the bell seemed to say to me, "Now has Destiny, with the

twelfth stroke of her hammer, knocked down the old year to you, poor

perishing mortals, at her auction of minutes."

The kneeling man now stood up and went quickly away. I could long see

him and his shadow disappearing in the moonlight.

I left my height, the boundary hill between two years, and went down to

where the man had been kneeling. I found a crucifix and a black leather

prayer-book in duodecimo, all thumbed yellow, except one leaf at the

beginning on which was the name of the owner, whose knees had worn deep

traces in the ice. I knew him well, he was a cottager whose two sons

had had to go to the war. On looking more closely, I found he had drawn

a circle in the snow, to keep off evil spirits.

I saw it all; the simple, weak-minded creature, whose soul was darkened

by a perpetual annular eclipse, had gone there on this solemn night to

hearken to the hollow distant muttering thunder of the coming storm,

and laid his prostrate soul, as it were, upon the earth to hear the

distant march of the approaching foe. "Shallow, timid soul," thought I,

"why should the dead that are to be come floating athwart the face of

the clear, still night--thy sleeping sons among them, memberless? Why

strive already to see the darting flames of conflagrations yet to come,

and to hear the dismal turmoil, the bitter wail, of a woe as yet

unborn? The coffins of the coming year have, as in times of pestilence,

no inscriptions yet--why should the names appear upon them? Oh! thy

Solomon's ring has been no protection against the destroying angel who

dwells within our breasts. And that vague, ugly giant-cloud, behind

which are death and the future, will prove, on approach, to _be_ death

and the future itself."

In hours like these we are all ready to lay our hats and swords on to

the bier--ay, and ourselves as well--our old wounds burn anew, and our

hearts, not being truly healed, a little thing breaks them again, like

arms imperfectly set. But the cruel, piercing lightning flash of some

great minute, the reflection of which stretches gleaming athwart the

whole river of our life, is necessary to us to make us blind to the

_ignes fatui_ and glowworms which meet us, to guide us, every hour: and

frivolous, giddy man needs some powerful shock to counteract his

tendency to continual petty naggling. Therefore, to us little

crustaceans sticking with our suckers upon the ship of this earth,

every new year's night is, like night in the old mythologies, a mother

of many gods in us--and in such a night there begins for us a better

normal year than that which began in 1624. And I felt as if I should

kneel, humble and penitent, on the spot where the poor childless father

had knelt.

But now a brisker air brought to my ears a burst of gladsome music; it

came like the breath of flowers across the frozen plain, horns and

trumpets on the church tower, sending their cheering harmonies over the

sleeping earth, ushering, with glad vigorous tones, the first hour of

the new year in to a world of anxious, doubting men. And I too grew

glad and strong; I raised my glance from the white shroud of the coming

spring, and gazed at the moon; and on these spots on her face (these

spots which grow green as you approach) I saw our earthly spring

reposing upon flowers, and already moving his young wings, soon to take

his flight with other birds of passage, and, bright with glittering

plumes, and hailed by skylarks' anthems, come and alight upon our

shores.

The distant new year's music flowed around me still I felt much

happier, and far more tender; I saw the _coming_ sorrows in the new

born year, but they wore such lovely masks that they were more like

sorrows that are _past_, or like the music around me--just as the rain

which falls through the great caverns in the Derbyshire hills sounds in

the distance like music.

But when I looked around me, and saw the white earth shining like a

white sun, and the silent deep blue sphere all round, like a household

circle of one great family--and as the music, like lovelier sighs,

accompanied my thoughts--as I fixed my gaze, with grateful heart, upon

the starry sky where all these thousands of stedfast witnesses of the

beautiful moments (moments faded, out of bloom, indeed, now--but the

great Beneficence spreads their _seed_ for evermore)--when I thought of

the men asleep all around me, and wished that they might all be happier

when they opened their eyes in the morning--and when I thought of

those awake UNDER me, whose slumbering souls stood in need of such a

wish,--my heart, oppressed by the music, and by the night, grew heavy

and grew full, and the blue sky, the glittering moon, and the sparkling

snow-height all melted into one great floating shimmer.

And in the shimmer, and amid the music, I heard voices of my friends,

and dear fellow-creatures, tenderly and anxiously wishing their new

year's wishes. They touched my heart so deeply, that I could but barely

_think_ my own--

"Oh! may you all be happy _all_ the years of your lives."

END OF BOOK I.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH BOOKS.

It has often been a source of much annoyance to me that to every

preface I write I am obliged to append a book--like the endorsement on

a bill of exchange--or an appendix to letters A to Z. Many a man who

dabbles in authorship by way of amusement has his books sent to him all

ready written and complete, straight from the cradle; so that all he

has to do is to attach his gold frontlets of prefaces to their

foreheads--which is nothing but painting the _corona_ about the sun. As

yet, however, not a single author has applied to me for a preamble to a

book, although for several years I have had a considerable number of

prefaces by me (all ready beforehand, and going at great bargains), in

which I extol to the best of my ability works which have not as yet

come in to being. In fact, I have now a perfect museum of these prize

medals and commemoration medals of other people's cleverness at the

service of anyone who may stand in need of them; they are all made by

the very finest of mint-machinery, and my collection of them is

increasing day by day; so that I shall be obliged to sell it off

wholesale before very long (I don't see what else I can do), and bring

out a book--consisting of nothing but pre-existent prefaces.

They will still be obtainable singly, however, until the Easter fair,

and authors who make early application can have the entire fascicle of

preludes forwarded to them, so that they can pick out for themselves

whichever preface seems to them the most laudatory of a book. After the

Easter fair however, when the Book of Prefaces above mentioned comes

out (and it will be interleaved with the fair catalogue), the literary

world will only be beglorified in _corpore_, in _coro_, and I shall be

(so to speak) making a present of a patent of nobility to the republic

of letters in the lump,--as the Empress Queen did in 1775 to the whole

mercantile community of Vienna; although I have before my eyes (in the

shape of the poor reviewers who work themselves well nigh to death,

hammering and building away at the temple of fame, and at triumphal

arches) the melancholy proof that though a man were to extol the

republic of letters even in six volumes folio, he would get less for it

than Sannazaro did for belauding the republic of Venice in as many

lines--for each line in the latter case brought the poet in a matter of

a hundred five-dollar pieces.

I propose to interstratify one of the prefaces in question in this

place by way of a specimen and experiment, making as if its celebrated

author had written it to order for this book (which is the actual

truth, moreover). There is no difficulty in my splitting myself up into

two characters, the flower painter and the preface maker. But,--as one

cannot _quite_ lose sight of feelings of becoming modesty--I carefully

pick out the most miserable specimen of the lot, one in which laudation

occurs but to a very moderate extent, one which places the author of

the book attached to it upon a funeral car, rather than upon a

triumphal one, with nothing whatever to draw it along moreover; whereas

the other prefaces harness posterity to them, and the reading public

are, by _them_, yoked on to the heavenly chariot, the Elijah's chariot,

of Immortality, in which they draw the author along.

In conclusion, then, I have only to observe that the celebrated author

of 'HESPERUS' has been kind enough to look through my Flower-pieces,

and contribute to them the following preface, which will be found well

worthy of perusal.

PREFACE, BY THE AUTHOR OF 'HESPERUS.'

The following remarks may be thrown into the form of a series of

postulates, which are, at the same time, so many similes.

Many authors (Young is an instance) set fire to their nerve-spirit,

which, like burning spirit of another kind (brandy), tinges every

person who stands round the inkbottle where it is flaring with a sham

DEADLY pallor. But, unfortunately, each looks only at the others, none

looks into the mirror. The effect of the proximity of this universal

mortality all about, upon people and authors, is that each is impressed

with a livelier sense of the exceptional nature of his own

_im_mortality; and this is remarkably comforting to us all.

The consequence is, as it seems to me, very plain. Poets, living in

fifth, or fiftieth floors, may make poems, but not marriages; neither

may they keep, nor establish, houses. Canaries' breeding cages have to

be more roomy than their singing cages.

If this be so, then, what does the author's pen do? Like a child's, it

traces in ink the characters which nature has faintly marked in the

reader with pencil.

The author's strings only vibrate in unison with the reader's octaves,

fifths, fourths, and thirds--not with his seconds or sevenths.

Unsympathetic readers do not become sympathetic ones; it is only the

cognate, or congruent, sort which rise to the author's level or pass

beyond it.

And with this stands or falls my fourth postulate. The iron shoe of

Pegasus is the armature of the magnet of truth, increasing its power of

attraction; yet we are hungry birds, and fly at the poet's grapes as

though they were real ones, thinking the _boy_ a painted one, when we

really ought to be frightened at _him_.

The transition from this to the fifth postulate is a self-evident

matter. Man has such a high opinion of everything in the shape of

antiquity, that he prolongs it, and keeps it alive, and lives according

to it, though it be but the cover and the mask of the very poison which

will destroy itself. There are two proofs of this proposition which I

leave aside, of set purpose; the first is, Religion, which is all

gnawed to worm dust; the second, Freedom, which is quite as much

crumbled to powder as the other. In my capacity of a member of the

Lutheran Church, I merely glance at the subject of relics (in support

of the proposition)--relics, in the case of which, as Vasquez the

Jesuit informs us, if they chance to be entirely eaten up of worms, we

must continue to worship what remains--that is to say, the worms which

have eaten them. Wherefore, meddle not with that nest of worms, the

time in which thou livest, or it will eat thee up; a million of worms

are quite equal to one dragon.

This must be admitted and assumed, at least if my sixth postulate is to

have any sense in it which is,--that no man is wholly indifferent to,

and unaffected by, _every_ kind of truth; indeed even if it be only to

poetical _reflections_ (illusions) that he swears allegiance--inasmuch

as he does even _that_ he thereby does homage to truth; for in all

poetry it is but the part which is _true_ which goes to the heart (or

head), just as in our passions and emotions nothing but the Moral

produces effect. A reflection which should be nothing whatever _but_ a

reflection would necessarily, for that very reason, not _be_ a

reflection. Every _semblance_ (meaning every thing which we _see_, or

suppose we _see_) presupposes the existence of _light_ somewhere, and

_is_ itself light, only in an enfeebled or reflected condition. Only,

most people in our, not so much _enlightened_ as _enlightening_ times,

are like nocturnal insects who avoid, or are pained by, the light of

day, but, in the night, fly to every _nocturnal_ light, every

phosphorescent surface.

The graves of the best men are like those of the Moravians, level and

flat, and this earthly sphere of ours is a Westminster Abbey of such

levellings and flattenings--ah! what innumerable drops of tears as well

as blood (which are what the three grand trees of this world--the trees

of Life, of Knowledge, and Liberty--are watered with) have been shed,

but never counted. History, in painting the human race, does not follow

the example of that painter who, making a portrait of a one-eyed king,

drew only his seeing profile; what history paints is the blind side,

and it needs some grand calamity to bring great men to light--as comets

are seen during total eclipses of the sun. Not upon the battle-field

only--upon the holy ground of virtue also, and upon the classic soil of

truth--the pedestal whereon history raises on high some _single_ hero

whose name rings in all men's ears has to be composed and built

up of thousands of _other_ heroes who have fought and fallen, nameless

and unknown. The noblest deeds of heroism are done within four walls,

not before the public gaze,--and as history keeps record only of the

_men_ sacrificed, and, on the whole, writes only in spilt blood,

doubtless our annals are grander and more beautiful in the eyes

of the all-pervading spirit of the universe than in those of the

history-writer; the great scenes of history are estimated according to

the numbers of angels or devils on the stage, the _men_ not being taken

into account.

These are the grounds on which I rely when I assert with a good deal of

boldness that when we inhale the perfume of the full-blown blossoms of

joy with too deep and strong an inhalation, without having first given

them a good shake, we run the risk of snuffing up some tormenting

insect (before we know what we are about) through the ethmoid into the

brain;[34] and _who_--tell me if you can--is to get it out again?

Whereas little or nothing of a risky sort can be snuffed up out of

_Flower-pieces_, and their painted calices, since painted worms remain

where they are.

This, then, is what _I_ have to postulate by means of similes. What the

_public_ postulates, or demands, is my opinion of these Flower-pieces.

The author is a promising youth of five years of age;[35] he and I have

been friends since childhood, and, I think, can assert that we have but

one soul between us, as Aristotle says should be the case with friends.

He gets me to read over everything he thinks of publishing, and to give

him my opinion and advice. And, as I returned these Flower-pieces to

him with the warmest (and, at the same time, sincerest) expression of

my approval, he has requested me to make my verdict somewhat more

widely known, believing as he does (rather too flatteringly perhaps)

that it may carry a certain amount of weight with it, more especially

as it is an impartial verdict, and, as such, one which can be placed in

the hands of the critics as a species of ruler wherewith to draw the

lines upon which _their_ verdicts may be written.

In this, however, he goes a little too far. All I can say is that the

work is written quite as if I had done it myself. There is no greater

amount of dynamic ornamentation in it than is usual in books, and,

happy as the author would have been to have thundered, stormed, and

poured in it, there was of course no room in a parish advocate's

lodgings for Rhine cataracts, thunderstorms, tropical hurricanes (of

tropes) or waterspouts, and he has had to reserve his more terrific

tornadoes for a future work. I have his permission to mention the name

of this future work; it is the 'Titan.' In this work he means to be an

absolute Hecla, and shatter the ice of his country (and himself into

the bargain) to pieces; like the volcanoes in Iceland, he will spout

up a column of boiling water four feet in diameter to a height of

eighty-nine or ninety feet in the air, and that at such a temperature

that when this wet fire pillar falls down again and flows into the book

shops, it will still be warm enough to boil eggs hard or their mother

soft. "Then" (he always says--very sadly however--because he sees what

a hard matter it is to distinguish between full half of our battling

and harrying here below and a Jack Pudding farce and piece of utter

buffoonery and nonsense,--also, that the cradle of this life _rocks_

us, and _stills_ us indeed, but carries us not a step on our

way)--"then may the _Arbor Toxicaria Macassariensis_[36] of the Ideal,

beneath which I have lost a little hair already, go on poisoning me,

and dispatch me to the Land of the Ideal. At all events, I have knelt

down and prayed under the solemnising soul-elevating sighing roar of

its death-dealing branches. And why should there be a hut made ready

for the traveller beside the eternal well of truth, marked with the

title 'Travellers' REST,' if no one ever enters it?" He wants, by way

of broad "flies" for his life stage on earth, merely a regular,

downright, _rainy year_ or two (two will suffice); for a broad, bright,

open sky overpowers us, and weakens the hand's pen power by making the

eyes over full. And here the book-maker differs markedly from his

provision-contractor, the papermaker, who shuts _his_ mill up precisely

when the weather is _wet_.

I should also be glad if readers would have the goodness to go once

more through the few chapters composing the first book--that they may

see what they really lack; and indeed a book which is not worth reading

twice is not worth reading once.

In conclusion, I (albeit the most inconsiderable clubbist and

vote-possessor of all the public) would fain incite the author to the

production of other seedlings, suckers, and infantas of the same stamp,

trusting that the reading world may form its opinion on his work with

the same careful favour and indulgent approval as I have formed mine.

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Hof in Voigtland,

_June 5th_, 1796.

* * * * *

Thus far my friend's preface. Utterly absurd as it is, my own preface,

you see, has got to be concluded too, and at the end of it I can but

sign myself as my aforesaid man Friday and namesake does, videlicet,

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Hof in Voigtland,

_June 5th_, 1796.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER V.

THE BROOM AND THE BESOM AS PASSION IMPLEMENTS--THE IMPORTANCE OF A

BOOKWRITER--DIPLOMATIC NEGOTIATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS ON THE SUBJECT

OF CANDLE SNUFFING--THE PEWTER CUPBOARD--DOMESTIC HARDSHIPS AND

ENJOYMENTS.

Catholics hold that there were fifteen mysteries in the life of

Christ--five of Joy, five of Woe, five of Glory. I have carefully

accompanied our hero through the five joyful mysteries of which the

Linden honey-month of his marriage has had to tell. I now come with him

to the five mysteries of Woe with which the series of the mysteries of

most marriages is--concluded. I trust, however, that his may yet be

found to contain the five of Glory also.

In my first edition, I began this book of my hero's story in an

unconcerned manner, with the above sentence just as if it were

literally correct. A second, and carefully revised edition, however,

renders it incumbent upon me to add, as an emendation, that the fifteen

mysteries in question do not come one after another, like steps of

stairs, or ancestors in a pedigree, but are shuffled up together like

good and bad cards in a hand. Yet, in spite of this shuffling, the joy

outbalances the sorrow, at any rate in its duration, as has been the

case, indeed, with this terrestrial globe, our planet itself, which has

survived several last days, and as a consequence still more springs,

that is to say, re-creations on a smaller scale. I mention all this to

save a number of poor devils of readers from the dreadful thought that

they have got to wade through a whole "Book II." full of tears, partly

to be read about, partly to be shed out of compassion. I am not one of

those authors who, like very rattlesnakes, can sit and gaze upon

thousands of charmed people running up and down, a prey to every kind

of agitation, suspense, and anxiety, till his time comes to spring upon

them and swallow them up.

When Siebenkæs awoke in the morning, he at once packed the devil of

jealousy, the marriage devil, off to the place where all other devils

dwell. For a calming sleep lowers the pulse of the soul's fever--the

grains thereof are fever-bark for the cold fever of hate, and also for

the hot fever of love. Indeed he put down the tracing board, and with a

pantograph made a correct, reduced copy of his yesterday's free

translation of the Engelkrautian countenance, and blackened it nicely.

When it was done, he said to his wife, for very love of her, "We'll

send him the profile this morning, at once. It may be a good long while

before he comes to fetch it." "Oh yes! he won't be here till Wednesday,

and by that time he'll have forgotten all about it." "But I could bring

him here sooner than that," Siebenkæs answered; "I need only send him

the Russian Trinity dollar of 1679 to get changed for me; he won't

_send_ me a farthing of the money he'll bring it himself as he always

has done all through Leibgeber's collection." "Or you might send him

the dollar and the picture both," said Lenette, "he would like it

better." "Which would he like better?" he asked. She didn't see exactly

what answer to make to this ridiculous question (whether she meant the

stamped face or the pictured one) sprung upon her like a mine in this

sort of way, and got out of her difficulty by saying, "Well, _the

things_, of course." He spared her any further catechising.

The Schulrath, however, sent nothing but an answer to the effect that

he was beside himself with delight at the charming presents, and would

come to express his thanks in person, and to settle up with the

advocate, by the end of the following week at latest. The little dash

of bitter flavour which was perceptible to the taste in this unexpected

answer of the too happy Schulrath, was by no means sweetened away by

the arrival at this moment of the messenger of the Inheritance Office,

with Heimlicher von Blaise's first proceedings in the matter of the

plaint lodged against him, consisting of a petition for three weeks'

grace within which to lodge answers, a delay which the Court had

readily accorded. Siebenkæs, as his own poor's advocate, lived in the

sure and certain hope that the promised land of inheritance, flowing

with milk and honey, would be reached by his children, though _he_

would in all probability have long ere that time perched in the

wilderness of the law; for justice is given to recompensing the

children, and the children's children, for the uprightness of the

fathers, and for the goodness of their cause. It was more or less in

convenient, at the same time, to have nothing to live upon during one's

own lifetime. The Russian Trinity dollar--for which the Schulrath

hadn't even paid as yet--couldn't be lived upon, and there were but one

or two queue ducats remaining of the treasury chest provided by

Leibgeber, for the carrying on of operations against the Heimlicher.

This gold coin and those few silver ones were (although I have said

nothing about it till now) the entire money contents remaining in the

Leibgeberian saviour's scrip, and indeed none but a true disciple and

follower of the Saviour could be expected to hold out upon them. My

silence on this matter of the emptying of the coin cabinet may perhaps

be accepted in evidence of the fact that I try as much as I can to

avoid mentioning anything calculated to give my readers pain.

"Oh! I shall get on somehow or other," said Siebenkæs quite gleefully,

as he set to work harder than ever at his writing, with the view of

getting a considerable haul of money into the house, at the earliest

moment possible, in the shape of payment for his 'Selection from the

Devil's Papers.'

But there was a fresh purgatorial fire now being stoked and blown, till

it blazed hotter and hotter about him. I have refrained from saying

anything about the fire in question till now, though he has been

sitting roasting at it since the day before yesterday, Lenette being

the cook, and his writing table the larkspit.

During the few days when the wordless quarrel was going on, he had got

into a habit of listening with the closest attention to what Lenette

was doing, as he sat writing away at his 'Selection from the Devil's

Papers'; and this sent his ideas all astray. The softest step, the very

slightest shake of anything affected him just as if he had had

hydrophobia, or the gout, and put one or two fine young ideas to death,

as a louder noise kills young canaries, or silkworms.

He controlled himself very well at first. He pointed out to himself

that his wife really could _not_ help moving about, and that as long as

she hadn't a spiritual or glorified body and furniture to deal with,

she couldn't possibly go about as silently as a sunbeam, or as her

invisible good and evil angels behind her. But while he was listening

to this _cours de morale_, this _collegium pietatis_ of his own, he

lost the run of his satirical conceits and contexts, and his language

was deprived of a good deal of its sparkle.

But the morning after the silhouette evening, when their hearts had

shaken hands and renewed the old royal alliance of Love, he could go

much more openly to work, and so, as soon as he had blackened

the profile, and had only his own original creations to go on

blackening--_i. e_. when he was going to begin working in his own

charcoal burning hut, he said to his wife, as a preliminary--

"If you can help it, Lenette, don't make very much noise to-day. I

really can hardly get on with my writing, if you do--you know it's for

publication."

She said "I'm sure you can't hear me--I go about so very quietly."

Although a man may be long past the years of his youthful follies, yet

in every year of his life there crop up a few weeks and days in which

he has fresh follies to commit. It was truly in a moment of one of

these days that Siebenkæs made the request above mentioned; for he had

now laid upon himself the necessity of lying in wait and watching to

see what Lenette would do in consequence of it. She skimmed over the

floor, and athwart the various webs of her household labours, with the

tread of a spider. Like her sex in general, she had disputed his little

point, merely for the sake of disputing it, not of doing what she was

asked not to do. Siebenkæs had to keep his ears very much on the alert

to hear what little noise she did make, either with her hands or her

feet--but he was successful, and did hear the greater part of it.

Unless when we are asleep we are more attentive to a slight noise than

to a loud one; and our author listened to her wherever she went, his

ear and his attention going about fixed to her like a pedometer

wherever she moved. In short he had to break off in the middle of the

satire, called "The Nobleman with the Ague," and jump up and cry to her

(as she went creeping about), "For one whole hour have I been listening

and watching that dreadful tripping about on tiptoe. I had much rather

you would stamp about in a pair of the iron-soled sandals people used

to wear for beating time in.[37] Please go about as you usually do,

darling."

She complied, and went about _almost_ as she usually did. He would have

very much liked to have prohibited the intermediate style of walking,

as he had the light and the heavy; but a husband doesn't care to

contradict himself twice in one morning; once is enough. In the evening

he asked her if she would mind going about the house in her stockings

when he was at work at his writing. She would find it nice and cool for

the feet. "In fact," he added, "as I'm working all the forenoon

literally for our bread, it would be well if you would do nothing that

isn't absolutely necessary while I am at my literary work."

Next morning he sat in judgment (mentally) upon everything that went on

behind his back, and challenged it to see if it could produce the

free-pass of necessity--going on with his writing all the time, but

doing it worse than usual. This scribbling martyr endured a great many

things with as much patience as he could muster, but when Wendeline

took to whisking the straw under the green painted marriage TORUS with

a long broom, the cross grew too heavy for his shoulder. It happened,

moreover, that he had been reading two days before in an old Ephemeris

of scientific inquirers, that a clergyman, of the name of Johann

Pechmann, couldn't bear the sound of a besom--that it nearly took his

breath away, and that he once took to his heels and bolted when a

crossing sweeper accidentally ran against him. The effect of his having

read this was, that he was involuntarily more observant and intolerant

of a cognate discomfort. He called out to the domestic sweeper in the

next room, from his chair where he sat--

"Lenette, do _not_ go on scrubbing and switching about with that besom

of yours, it drives away the whole of my best ideas out of my head.

There was an old clergyman once of the name of Pechmann, who would

rather have been condemned to sweep a crossing in Vienna himself, than

to listen to another sweeping it--he would rather have been flogged

with a birch-broom, than have heard the infernal sound of it swishing

and whishing. How is a man to get a coherent idea, fit to go to the

printer and publisher, into his head with all this sweeping and

scrubbing going on?"

Lenette did what every good wife, and her lap dog, would have done; she

left off the noise by degrees. At last she laid down the besom, and

merely whisked three straws and a little feather fluff gently with the

hair-broom, from under the bed, not making as much noise even as he did

with his writing. However the editor of the 'Devil's Papers' managed to

hear it, in a manner beyond his fondest hopes. He rose up, went to the

bedroom door and called in at the room, "My darling, it's every bit as

hellish a torment to me if I can hear it _at all_. You may fan those

miserable sweepings with a peacock's feather, or a holy-water asperger,

or you may puff them away with a pair of bellows, but I and my poor

book must suffer and pay the piper all the same."

"I'm quite done now, at all events," she said.

He set to work again, and gaily took up the threads of his fourth

satire, "Concerning the five Monsters and their receptacles, whereon I

at first intended to subsist."

Meanwhile Lenette gently closed the door, so that he was driven to the

conclusion that there was something or other going on to annoy him

again in his Gehenna and place of penitence. He laid down his pen and

cried--

"Lenette, I can't hear very distinctly what it is--but you're up to

something or other in there that I can _not_ stand. For God's dear

sake, stop it at once, do put a period to my martyrdom and sorrows of

Werther, for this one day--come here, let me see you."

She answered, all out of breath with hard work--

"I'm not doing anything."

He got up and opened the door of his chamber of torture. There was his

wife rubbing away with a piece of grey flannel, polishing up the green

rails of the bed. The author of this history once lay sick of smallpox

in a bed of this kind, and knows them well. But the reader may not be

aware that a green slumber cage of this kind is a good deal like a

magnified canaries' breeding cage with its latticed folding doors or

portcullises, and that this trellis and hothouse for dreams is, though

less handsome in appearance, much better for health than our heavy

bastille towers all hung about with curtains which keep away every

breath of fresh air. The advocate swallowed about half a pint of

bedroom air, and said, in measured accents--

"You're at your brushing and sweeping again, are you? although you know

quite well that I'm sitting there working like a slave for you and

myself too, and that I've been writing away for the last hour with

scarcely an idea in my head. Oh! my heavenly better half! out with all

your cartridges at one shot, for God's sake, and don't finish me off

altogether with that rag of yours."

Lenette, full of astonishment said, "It's simply impossible, old man.

that you can hear me in the next room"--and polished away harder than

ever. He took her hand, somewhat hastily, though not roughly, and said

in a louder tone, "Come, get up!--It's exactly that which I complain

of, that I _can't_ hear you in the next room; I'm obliged to rack my

brains to guess what you're at--and the only ideas left in my head are

connected with brushing and scrubbing, so that all the brilliant

notions which I might otherwise be putting down on paper are driven

away. My darling child, nobody could possibly sit and work away here

more composedly and contentedly than I, if it were only grape-shot and

canister, howitzer shells, and hundred-pounders that you were banging

away with at my back out of these embrasures of yours. What it is that

I really can _not_ stand, is a _quiet_ noise."

All this talk having put him a little out of temper, he fetched her out

of the room, rag and all, saying--

"It does seem a little hard that, while I'm labouring away here with

all my might, working myself almost to death, to provide a little

entertainment for the reading public, a regular bear-baiting pit should

be started in my own room, and that an author's very bed should be

turned into a siege-trench, and arrows and fire-balls sent about his

ears out of it. There, I shan't be writing while we're at dinner, I'll

talk the thing out at full length with you then."

At noon, then,[38] as he was about to enter on the subject of the

morning's tourney, he had first to hold a prayer-tourney. I mean this:

"prayers" do not, in Nürnberg and Kuhschnappel, mean a certain

hereditary office and service of mass in a court chapel, but--the

ringing of the twelve o'clock bell. Now the dining-table of our couple

stood against the wall, and was not put in the middle of the floor

except for meals. Well, Siebenkæs never succeeded above twice during

his married life in having this table brought forward BEFORE the soup

came in (for if a woman ONCE forgets a thing, she goes on forgetting it

a thousand times running[39]), though he preached his lungs as dry as a

fox's (which are used for curing ours); both soup and table were always

moved together, after the soup came in, without the spilling of a

greater quantity of the latter than one might have used in swallowing a

pill.

To-day this was the case as usual. Siebenkæs slowly chewed the pill

which he swallowed with the soup. The delay in moving the table he

observed anxiously (as if it had been a delay in the arrival of

an equinox), with a long face and slow breathing, and when the

soup-libation was duly poured as usual, he broke out as follows, in a

calm tone of voice, however--

"The fact is, Lenette, we are on board a good ship. At sea, you know,

people spill their soup because their vessel rolls and pitches--and

ours is spilt for a similar reason. See here, the dinner-table

and the morning besom are both in a tale together; they are two

conspirators who will blow out your husband's candle--to use a strong

expression--before they have done."

This, the exordium of his sermon, was followed by way of hymn, by the

arrival of the town fool of Kuhschnappel, who brought in a great sheet

of paper containing an invitation to the shooting match on St. Andrew's

Day, the 30th of November. Every one of us must, I am sure, have

gathered from what has already been said that the only money left in

the house was the queue-ducat. At the same time, Siebenkæs couldn't

leave the shooting-club, without thereby granting to himself a

certificate of poverty, a _testimonium paupertatis_, in the face of the

whole town. And really a shooting-ticket for this match was almost as

good as mining shares or East India stock to a man who was as good a

shot as Siebenkæs. It would also give him an opportunity of doing that

public honour to his wife which she, as a senate clerk's daughter from

Augspurg, had a right to expect. Unfortunately, however, the grave man

of folly couldn't be got to give change for the curious queue-ducat,

particularly as Siebenkæs aroused his suspicions with respect to it

himself, by saying. "This is a very good tail or queue-ducat, I assure

you. I don't wear a tail myself," he added, "but that's no reason why a

ducat shouldn't, if the King of Prussia chooses to immortalise his own

by having it stamped upon it. Wife, would you get our landlord, the

hairdresser, to come up; nobody can know better than he whether it's a

queue-ducat or not, seeing he has queues (not upon ducats) in his hands

every day." The pickle-herring of Kuhschnappel didn't vouchsafe the

ghost of a smile at this. The hairdresser came, and declared it to be a

queue, and civilly took it away himself to get it changed. Hairdressers

can run; in five minutes he brought the change for the ducat.

When the melancholy buffoon had pocketed his portion of it, Lenette's

face was all over double interjections and marks of interrogation;

wherefore Siebenkæs resumed his midday sermon. "The principal prizes,"

he said, "are pewter dishes and sums of money for hitting the bird, and

mostly provisions for the other marks we shoot at. I suspect that you

and I shall dine on St. Andrew's Day upon a nice piece of roast meat in

a new dish, both of which I shall have shot into your kitchen, if I

only take a little pains. And at all events don't worry yourself,

darling, because our money's nearly all gone. Take refuge behind me. I

am your sandbag, your gabion, your shelter trench, and with my rifle,

more certainly still with my pen, I feel pretty sure I shall keep the

devil of poverty at his distance, till my precious guardian hands over

my mother's property. Only for God's sake don't let _your_ work

interrupt _mine_. Your rag and your besom have cost me at least sixteen

currency dollars this morning. For supposing I get eight imperial

dollars a printed sheet for my Devilish Papers (counting the imperial

dollar at ninety kreuzer)--and I ought, to get more--I should have

earned forty-eight currency dollars this morning if I had written a

(printed) sheet and a half. But you see I had to stop in the middle of

it and expend a great many words upon you, for none of which I get a

single kreuzer. You should look upon me as a fat old spider stowed away

in a box to shrivel up in time into a precious gold nugget or jewel.

Whenever I take a dip of ink I draw a thread of gold out of the ink

bottle, as I've often told you, and (as the proverb says) the morning

hours have gold in their mouths (Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund). Go on

with your dinner, and listen. I'll just take this opportunity of

explaining to you the principal points in which the preciousness of an

author consists, and so give you the key to a good many things. In

Swabia, in Saxony, and Pomerania, there are towns in which there are

people who appraise authors as our master butcher here does beef. They

are usually known by the name of tasters or rulers of taste, because

they try the flavour of every book as it comes out, and then tell the

people whether they'll like it or not. We authors in our irritation

often call these people critics, but they might bring an action against

us for libel for so doing. Now as these directors of taste seldom write

books themselves, they have all the more time to read and find fault

with other people's. Yet it does sometimes happen that some of them

have written bad books themselves, and consequently know a bad book in

a moment when they come across one. Many become patron saints of

authors and of their books for the same reason that St. John Nepomuck

became the patron saint of bridges and those who cross them; because he

was once thrown off one into the water. Now these scribblings of mine

will be sent to these gentlemen as soon as they are in print (as your

hymn-book is). And they'll peer all through my productions to see

whether or not I've written them quite legibly and distinctly (not too

large or too small), whether I've put any wrong letters, a little e for

a big, or an f instead of a ph, whether the hyphen-strokes are too long

or too short, and all that sort of thing: indeed they often even give

opinions about the thoughts in the book (which they have nothing to do

with). Now you see, if you go on scrubbing and swishing about with

besoms behind me, I shall keep writing all sorts of stuff and nonsense,

and it'll all be printed. Of course that's a terrible thing to happen

to a man, for these tasters tear great frightful holes and wounds in

the paper however fine it is, with nails as long as fingers

(buttonmakers' nails are shorter, but not circumcisers' among the

Jews), before they give it a name to carry about with it, as the

circumcisers do to the Jew boys. And after this, they circulate a slip

of unsized paper, in which they find fault with me, and give me a bad

name, all over the empire, in Saxony and Pomerania, and tell all Swabia

in so many plain words that I'm an ass. May the devil confound their

impertinence! This is the sort of birching, you see, that besom of

yours will be getting me in for. Whereas, if I write beautifully and

legibly, and with proper attention and ability--and every sheet of my

Devilish Papers is so written--if I carefully weigh and consider every

word and every page before I write it, if I am playful in one place,

instructive in another, pleasing in all,--in that case I am bound to

tell you, Lenette, that the tasters are people who are quite capable of

appreciating work of that sort, and would think nothing of sitting down

and circulating papers in which the least they would say of me would be

that I had certainly brought something away from college in my head,

and had a little to show for my studies. In short, they would say, they

hadn't expected it of me, and there was really something _in me_. Now a

panegyric of this kind upon a husband is reflected, of course, upon his

wife, and when the Augspurg people are all asking 'Where does he live,

this Siebenkæs whom everybody's talking of?' there are sure to be lots

of folks in the Fuggery to answer, 'Oh! he lives in Kuhschnappel, his

wife was a daughter of Engelkraut, the senate clerk, and a very good

wife she is to him.'"

"You've told me all that about bookmaking hundreds of times," she

answered. "And it's just what the bookbinder says too; and I am sure

_he_ has all the best books through his hands, binding them."

This allusion to his repetitions of himself, though not meant

ill-temperedly, he didn't very much relish. In fact, the habit had

hitherto been, as it were, incubating unperceived in him, as a fever

does in its early stage. Husbands, even those who are sage and of few

words, talk to their wives with the same boundless liberty and

unrestraint as they do to their own selves; and a man repeats himself

_to_ himself immeasurably oftener than to anybody else, and that

without so much as observing that he does it, let alone taking any

count of how often. The wife, however, both observes and counts;

accustomed as she is to hear the cleverest (and most unintelligible)

remarks from her husband's lips daily, she can't help remembering them

when they occur again.

The hairdresser reappeared unexpectedly, bringing a fleeting cloud with

him. He said he had been to all the poor devils in the house to see if

he could get as much of the Martinmas rent out of them in advance as

would pay his subscription to the shooting match, but that they were a

set of church mice and he hadn't succeeded. The whole garrison of them

were naturally unequal to the payment of an impost of this description

six whole weeks before it was due, inasmuch as the majority of them

didn't see how they were to pay it when it _was_ due. So the Saxon came

to the grandee of his house, to the "Lord of Ducats" as he styled the

advocate. Siebenkæs couldn't find in his heart to disappoint the

patient soul with another "no" on the top of those he had borne so

good-humouredly; his wife and he scraped together the little small

change they had left out of the ducat, and sent him away rejoicing with

half of the rent, three gulden. All they had left for themselves

was--the question what they should do for light in the evening; for

there weren't even a couple of groschen in the house to get half a

pound of candles, and there were no candles _in natura_.

I cannot say that he here turned deadly pale, or fainted, or began to

rave. Praise be to every manly soul who has drunk the icy whey of

stoicism for only half a spring, and does not fall down paralysed and

frozen, like a woman, before the chill spectre of penury. In an age

which has had all its strongest sinews cut through except the universal

one, money, any diatribe, even the most extravagant, against riches, is

nobler and more useful than the most accurately just depreciation of

poverty. For pasquinades on gold dirt are agreeable to the rich,

reminding them that though their riches may take to themselves wings,

true happiness does not depend thereon; while the poor derive from them

not bitterer feeling merely, but also the sweeter satisfaction of

conquering the same. All that is base in man--thoughts, fancies, what

we look on as being examples--all join in one chorus in praise of gold;

why should we desire to deprive poverty of her true reserve force, her

_chevaliers d'honneur_, philosophy and beggars' pride?

The first thing Siebenkæs opened was not his mouth, but the door, and

then the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, from which he carefully and

with a good deal of gravity took down a bell-shaped tureen and three

pewter plates, and put them on a chair. Lenette could no longer stand

by in silence; she clasped her hands and said in a faint voice of

shame, "Merciful Providence! is it come to selling our dishes?"

"I'm only going to turn them into silver," he said; "as kings make

church bells into dollars, so shall we make our bell-dishes into coin.

There's nothing you need be ashamed about in converting trash of table

ware, the coffins of beasts, into currency, when Duke Christian of

Brunswick turned a king's silver coffin into dollars in 1662. Is a

plate an apostle, do you think? Great monarchs have taken many an

apostle, if he happened to be a silver one, Hugo of St. Caro and others

as well, divided them (as it were) into chapters, verses, and legends,

sent them to the mint, and then dispatched them off all over the world

in that analysed form."

"Ah! stupid nonsense," she answered.

Some few readers will probably say "What else was it?" and I ought long

ago to have apologized, perhaps, for the style of speech, so

incomprehensible to Lenette, which the advocate makes use of.

He justified it satisfactorily to himself by the consideration that his

wife always had some DISTANT idea of what he was talking about, even

when he made use of the most learned technical expressions, and the

farthest-fetched plays upon words, because of its being good practice,

and of his liking to hear himself do it. "Women," he would repeat,

"have a distant and dim comprehension of all these things, and

therefore don't waste, in long tedious efforts to discover the precise

signification of these unintelligibilities, precious time which might

be better employed." This, I may observe, is not much encouragement for

Reinhold's 'Lexicon to Jean Paul's Levana,' nor for me personally

either, in some senses.

"Ah! stuff and nonsense" had been Lenette's answer. Firmian merely

asked her to bring the pewter into the sitting-room, and he would talk

the matter over sensibly. But he might as well have set forth his

reasons before a woman's skin stuffed with straw. What she chiefly

blamed him for, was that by his contribution to the shooting-club purse

he had emptied hers. And thus she herself suggested to him the best

answer he could have made. He said, "It was an angel that put it in my

head; because on St. Andrew's Day I shall regain everything that I turn

into silver now, and repewterise it immediately. To please you, I shall

keep not only the tureen and the plates I get as prizes, but all the

rest of the pewter ware, and put it all into your cupboard. I assure

you I had made up my mind before to sell all my prizes."

What was to be done, then? There was no help for it. This banished and

expatriated table ware was lowered in the darkness of evening into old

Sabel's basket--and she was celebrated all over the town for

transacting this sort of commission agency or transfer business, with

as discreet a silence as if she were dealing in stolen gold. "Nobody

gets it out of _me_," she would say, "whose the things are. The

treasurer, who's dead and gone poor man--you know I sold everything he

had in the world for him--he often used to say there was never the

equal of me."

But, my poor dear young couple, I fear this Sabbath[40] or "Descent of

the Saviour into Hades" is but little likely to help you long, in that

antechamber of hell which you've got into. The flames are gone from

about you to-day, certainly, and a cool sea-breeze is refreshing you,

but tomorrow and the day after the old smoke and the old fire will be

blazing at your hearts! However, I don't want to put any restrictions

upon your trade in tin. We're quite right to have a good dinner to-day

though we know perfectly well we shall be just every bit as hungry

to-morrow again.

So the next morning Siebenkæs begged that he might be allowed to be all

the quieter that day because he had been obliged to talk so much the

day before. Our dear Lenette, who was a live washing-machine and

scouring-mill, and in whose eyes the washing bill and the bill of fare

had much of the weight of a confessor's certificate, would sooner have

let go her hold of everything in the world--her husband included--than

of the duster and the besom. She thought this was merely _his_

obstinate persistency, whereas it was really her own, in blowing the

organ bellows and thundering away upon her pedal reed stops right

behind her author's back during the morning hours, whose mouths had two

kinds of gold in them for _him_, namely gold from the golden age, and

ordinary metallic gold. She might have played with a thirty-two feet

stop out in the afternoon as long as she liked, but she wasn't to be

got out of her usual daily routine. A woman is the most heterogeneous

compound of obstinate will and self-sacrifice that I have ever met

with; she would let her head be cut off by the headsman of Paris for

her husband's sake, very likely, but not a single hair of it. And she

can deny herself to almost any extent for others' good, but not one bit

for her own. She can forego sleep for three nights running for a sick

person, but not one minute of a nap before bed-time, to ensure herself

a better night's sleep in bed. Neither the souls of the blest, nor

butterflies, though neither of them possess stomachs, can eat less than

a woman going to a ball or to her wedding, or than one cooking for her

guests; but if it's only her doctor and her own health that forbid her

some Esau's mess or other, she eats it that instant. Now men's

sacrifices are all just turned the opposite way.

Lenette, impelled by two imposing forces, what she was asked to do and

what she wanted to do, tried to find the feminine line of the

resultant, and hit upon the middle course of stopping her scouring and

sweeping as long as he was sitting at his writing. But the moment he

got up, and went to the piano for a couple of minutes, or to the

window, or across the doorstep, that instant back she would bring her

washing and scrubbing instruments of torture into the room again.

Siebenkæs wasn't long in becoming cognisant of this terrible

alternation and relieving-of-the-guard between her besom and his

(satirical) one; and the way she watched and lay in wait for his

movements drove all the ideas in his head higgledy-piggledy. At first

he bore it with really very great patience, as great as ever a husband

has, patience, that is, which lasts for a short time. But after

reflecting for a considerable period in silence, that the public, as

well as he, were sufferers by this room-cleaning business, and that all

posterity was, in a manner, watching and hanging upon every stroke of

that besom, which might do its work just as well in the afternoon when

he would only be at his law papers--the tumour of his anger suddenly

broke, and he grew mad, _i. e_. madder than he was before, and ran up

to her and cried--

"Oh! this is the very devil! At it again, eh! I see what you're about.

You watch till I get up from the table! Just be kind enough to finish

me off at once; hunger and worry will kill me before Easter, whether or

not. Good God! It's a thing I really can _not_ comprehend. She sees as

well as possible that my book is our larder--that there are whole

rations of bread in every page of it--yet she holds my hands the entire

morning, so that I can't do a line of it. Here I've been sitting on the

nest all this time and only hatched as far as letter E, where I

describe the ascent of Justice to heaven. Oh! Lenette! Lenette!"

"Very well," said Lenette, "it's all the same whatever I do, it's sure

to be wrong; do let me tidy the house properly, like any other woman."

And she asked him, in a simple manner, why it was that the bookbinder's

little boy (the language is mine, not hers), who played fantasias the

whole day long upon a child's toy fiddle, composing and enjoying whole

Alexander's Feasts upon it, didn't disturb him with his screeching

_un_harmonical progressions--and how he bore the chimneysweep's

sweeping the other day so much better than he did her sweeping of the

room. And as he couldn't quite manage to condense, just in a moment,

into few words the demonstration of the magnitude of the difference

which existed between these things, he found it better to get into a

rage again, and say--

"Do you suppose I'm going to make a great long speech and explanation

gratis, and lose dollar after dollar at my work? _Himmel_! _Kreuz_!

_Wetter_! The municipal code, the Roman pandects, forbid a coppersmith

even to enter a street where a professor is working, and here's my own

wife harder than an old jurist--and not only that--she's the

coppersmith herself. I'll tell you what it is, Lenette, I shall really

speak to the Schulrath about this." This did a great deal of service.

The produce of the Trinity dollar here arrived before the Schulrath; a

piece of polite attention which no one would have expected from a man

of so much learning and knowledge. No doubt all my readers will be as

much delighted as if they were husbands of Lenette themselves at the

fact that she was a perfect angel all the afternoon; her hands made no

more noise at their work than her fingers or her needle; she even put

off the doing of several things which were not necessary. She

accompanied a sister in the oratorical art, who came in with a divine

bonnet (in her hands, to be altered), all the way down stairs, not so

much out of politeness as thoughtfulness, that all the points of

principal importance connected with the doing up of the bonnet, which

had already been settled, might be gone over again two or three times

out of the advocate's hearing.

This touched the old noise-hunter, and went to the weak and tender

spot in him, his heart. He sought long in himself for a fitting

thank-offering in return, till he at last hit upon quite a new sort of

one.

"Listen, child," he said, taking her hand very affectionately;

"wouldn't it be more reasonable in me if I were to amuse myself with my

writing in the _evening_? I mean, if the husband were to do his

creating at a time when the wife had no washing to do. Just think what

a life of nectar and ambrosia that would be; we should sit opposite to

each other with a candle between us--you at your sewing, I at my

writing--the other people in the house would all have their work done

and be at their beer--of course there wouldn't be customers with

bonnets coming at that time of night to make themselves visible and

audible. The evenings will be getting longer too, and of course I shall

have the more time for my writing fun, but we need say nothing about

that now. What do you think, or what do you _say_ (if you like the

expression better), to this new style of life? Remember too, that we're

quite rich again now--the Russian Trinity dollar is like so much found

money."

"Oh! it will be delightful," she said, "I shall be able to do all my

household work in the morning, as a proper reasonable housekeeper

should."

"Yes, just so," he answered, "I shall write away quietly at my satires

all morning, then wait till evening, and go on where I left off."

The evening of nectar and ambrosia came duly on, and was quite without

a rival among all evenings that had gone before it. A young married

couple, sitting one on each side of a table, working away quietly at

their work, with a candle between them, have a considerable notion what

happiness is. He was all happy thoughts and kisses; she all smiles, and

what little noise she made with the frying-pan seemed no louder to him

than what she made with her needle. "When people are earning double

working-pay by the light of one candle," he said, greatly delighted at

the domestic reformation, "they needn't, as far as I see, restrict

themselves to a miserable dip, the thickness of a worm, which they can

see nothing by, unless it be the wretchedness of its own light.

To-morrow we'll set up a mould candle, and no more about it."

As I take some credit to myself for selecting for narration in this

story such events only as are of universal interest, it will be

sufficient cursorily to mention that the mould candle duly appeared

next evening, and kindled a feeble strife, because, _apropos_ of this

candle, the advocate once more brought forward a new theory of his,

concerning the lighting of candles. He held the somewhat schismatic

opinion that the rational way of lighting all candles, more

particularly thick ones, was to light them at the thick end, and not at

the top or thin end; and that this was the reason of there being two

wicks projecting from every candle. "A law of combustion," he would

add, "in support of which I need only refer (at least for women of

sense) to the self-evident truth that, when a candle is burning down,

it keeps growing larger and larger at its lower extremity--just as

people who are burning down from debauchery grow thicker at theirs,

with fat and dropsy. If we light the candle at the top, we find the

result to be a useless lump, plug, or stump of tallow running all over

our candlestick. Whereas, if we light it at the bottom, the liquefied

grease from the thick end wraps itself gradually and with the most

exquisite symmetry all over the thinner end as if feeding it, and

equalising its proportions."

In reply to which, Lenette, with some force, adduced Shaftesbury's

touchstone of truth, ridicule. "Why, everybody that came in of an

evening, and noticed that I had put my candle upside down in the

candlestick, would burst out laughing; and it would be the wife that

everybody would blame." So that a mutual treaty of peace had to put a

period to this battle of the candle, to the effect that he should light

his candle at the bottom, and she hers at the top. And for the present,

as the candle common to both parties happened to be thick at the top,

he agreed to admit, without objection, the erroneous method of

lighting.

However, the Devil, who crosses and blesses himself at such treaties of

peace, managed so to play his cards, that on this very day Siebenkæs

chanced, in his reading, to come upon the touching anecdote of the

younger Pliny's wife holding the lamp for her husband that he might see

to write. And it occurred to him that, now that he was getting along so

swimmingly with his selection from the said Devil's Papers, it would be

a splendid arrangement, and save him many interruptions, if Lenette

would snuff the candle always instead of his doing it himself.

"Of course," said she, "I shall be delighted." The first fifteen or

twenty minutes passed, and everything seemed to be all right.

The above period having elapsed, he cocked up his chin towards the

candle, by way of reminder to her to snuff it. Next, he gently touched

the snuffers with the tip of his pen, with the like object, not saying

anything however; and a little while after that, he moved the

candlestick a little bit, and said softly, "The candle." Matters now

began to assume a more serious aspect; he began to observe and watch

with greater attention the gradual obscuration of his paper, and

consequently the very snuffers which, in Lenette's hands, had promised

to throw so much light on his labours, became the means of impeding his

progress quite as effectually as the crabs did Hercules in his battle

with the hydra. The two wretched ideas, "snuff" and "snuffers," took

bodily shape, and danced hand in hand, with a sprightly pertness up and

down on every letter of his most biting satires. "Lenette," he had soon

to say again, "please to amputate that stupid black stump there, on

both our accounts."

"Dear me, have I been forgetting it?" she said, and snuffed it in a

great hurry.

Readers of a historical turn--such as I should wish mine to be--can now

see that things couldn't but get worse and worse, and more and more out

of joint. He had often to stop, making letters a yard or so in length,

waiting till some beneficent hand should remove the black thorn from

the rose of light, till, at length, he broke out with the word "Snuff!"

Then he took to varying his verbs, saying, "Enlighten!" or "Behead!" or

"Nip-off." Or he endeavoured to introduce an agreeable variety by using

other forms of speech, such as "The candle's cap, Capmaker;" "There's a

long spot in the sun again;" or, "This is a charming _chiaroscuro_,

well adapted for night thoughts in a beautiful Correggio-night; but

snuff away all the same."

At last, shortly before supper, when the charcoal stack in the flame

had really attained a great height, he inhaled half a river of air into

his lungs, and, slowly dropping it out again, said, in a grimly mild

manner, "You don't snuff a bit--as far as I can see, the black

funereal pyre might rise up to the ceiling for all you would care. All

right! I prefer to be the candle-snuffer of this theatre myself till

supper-time; and while we're at supper I shall just say to you, as a

rational man, what there is to say on the subject." "Oh! yes, please,"

she said, quite delighted.

When she had set four eggs on the table, two for each, he commenced:

"You see, I had been looking forward to my working at night being

attended with several advantages, because I thought you would have

managed this easy little task of snuffing the candle always at the

right time, as a Roman lady of high rank made herself do duty as a

candlestick for her celebrated husband, Pliny junior (to use a

commercial expression), and held his light for him. I was mistaken, it

appears; for, unfortunately, I can't write with my toes under the

table, like a person with no arms, nor yet in the dark, as a

clairvoyant might. The only use the candle is to me, in the

circumstances, is that it serves as an Epictetus lamp, enabling me to

get some practice in stoicism. It had often as much as twelve inches of

eclipse, like a sun, and I wished in vain, darling, for an invisible

eclipse--such as frequently occurs in the heavens. The cursed slag of

our candle hatches just these obscure ideas and gloomy night thoughts,

which authors (too) often have. Whereas, gracious goodness! if you had

only snuffed, as you ought to have done----"

"You're in fun, are you not?" she asked. "My stitches are much smaller

than your strokes, and I'm sure I saw quite well."

"Well, dear," he continued, "I'll proceed to point out to you that, on

the grounds of psychology and mental science, it isn't that it matters

a bit whether a person who is writing and thinking _sees_ a little more

or less distinctly or not, it's the snuffers and the snuff that he

can't get out of his head, and they get behind his spiritual legs, trip

up his ideas, and stop him, just as a log does a horse hobbled to it.

For even when you've only just snuffed the candle, and I'm in the full

enjoyment of the light, I begin to look out for the instant when you'll

do it next. Now, this watching being in itself neither visible nor

audible, can be nothing but a thought, or idea; and as every thought

has the property of occupying the mind to the exclusion of all others,

it follows that all an author's other and more valuable ideas are sent

at once to the dogs. But this is by no means the worst of the affair.

I, of course, _ought_ not to have had to occupy my head with the idea

of candle-snuffing any more than with that of snuff-taking; but when

the ardently longed-for snuffing never comes off at all, the black

smut on the ripe ear of light keeps growing longer--the darkness

deepening--a regular funereal torch feebly casting its ray upon a

half-dead writer, who can't drive from his head the thought of the

conjugal hand which could snap all the fetters asunder with one single

snip;--then, my dearest Lenette, it's not easy for the said writer to

help writing like an ass, and stamping like a dromedary. At least, I

express my own opinion and experience on the subject!"

On this, she assured him that, if he were really serious, she would

take great care to do it properly next evening.

And, in truth, this story must give her credit for keeping her word,

for she not only snuffed much oftener than the night before, but, the

fact is, she _hardly ever left off_ snuffing, particularly after he had

nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.

"Don't snuff _too_ often, darling," he said, at length, but very, very

kindly. "If you attempt _too_ fine sub-sub-subdivisions (fractions of

fractions of fractions of fractions) of the wick, it'll be almost as

bad as ever--a candle snuffed too short gives as little light as one

with an overgrown wick which you may apply to the lights of the world

and of the Church, that's to say if you _can_. It's only for a short

while _before_ and _after_ the snuffing, _entre chien et loup_ as it

were, that that delicious middle-age of the soul prevails when it can

see to perfection; when it is truly a life for the gods, a just

proportion of black and white, both in the candle and on the book."

I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate

ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor's advocate has

evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he

is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,--superficially

perhaps, but still, watching and calculating--the mean term, or

middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has

he left for his work?

Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked,

though somewhat doubtfully, "Dirty clothes for the wash already?" Next

time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at

her interrogatively, and said, "Well? well?"

"In one instant," said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply

absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when

he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in

the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round

it to the bargain.

"Oh, good Lord! 'Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!" cried

he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle--out.

This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for

jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in

detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably

he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme

nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too

close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without

saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded

to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the

merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded

wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. "Just answer

me," he said.

She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the

table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused

her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised,

he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system;

and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him

contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for _him_; his

heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these

goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced

a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of

it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke.

So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof

being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a

Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with

absolute freedom of snuffing.

But the peace was soon embittered, inasmuch as Penia, goddess of

poverty (who has thousands of invisible churches all about the country,

where most houses are her tabernacles and lazar cells), began to make

manifest her bodily presence and her all-controlling power. There was

no more money in the house. But, rather than place his honour and his

freedom in pledge, and incur obligations which he had less and less

prospect of repaying--I mean, rather than borrow--he would have sold

all he had, and himself into the bargain, like the old German. It is

said, the national debt of England, if counted out in dollars, would

make a ring round the earth, like a second equator; however, I have not

as yet measured this nose-ring of the British Lion, this annular

eclipse, or halo, round the sun of Britain, myself. But I know that

Siebenkæs would have considered a negative money-girdle of this sort

about his waist to be a penance-belt stuck full of spines, or an iron

ring, such as people who tow boats have on; a girdle compressing the

heart in a fatal manner. Even supposing he were to borrow, and then

stop payment, as nations and banking-houses do--a catastrophe which

debtors and aristocratic persons, who have their wits about them,

manage to avoid without difficulty, by the simple expedient of never

_beginning_ payment--yet, having only one friend whom he could convert

into a creditor (Stiefel), he couldn't possibly have seen this dear

friend, who was in the first rank of his spiritual creditors already,

figuring in the fifth rank, or that of the unpaid. He therefore avoided

such a two-fold transgression as this would have been--a sin against

both friendship and honour--by pledging things of less value, namely,

household furniture.

He went back (but alone) to the pewter cupboard in the kitchen, and

peeped through the rail to see whether there were two ranks of dishes

or three. Alas! there wag but one rear-rank man of a plate standing

behind his front-rank man, like double notes of interrogation. He

marched the rear-rank man to the front accordingly, and gave him for

travelling companions and fellow-refugees a herring-dish, a sauce-boat,

and a salad-bowl. Having effected this reduction of his army, he

extended the remaining troops so as to occupy a wider front, and

subdivided the three large gaps into twenty small ones. He then moved

these disbanded soldiers to the sitting-room, and went and called

Lenette, who was in the bookbinder's room.

"I've been looking at our pewter cupboard for the last five or ten

minutes," he said. "I really shouldn't have noticed, if I hadn't known

it, that I had taken away the tureen and the plates. Should you?"

"Ah, indeed, I do notice it every day of my life," she declared.

Here, however, being rather uneasy at the idea of what might be

the result of _too_ long an inspection, he hurried her into the

sitting-room, where the dishes were which he had just taken out, and

made known his intention of transposing, like a clever musician, this

quartett from the key of pewter into that of silver. He proposed the

selling of them, that she might be got to agree the more easily to

their being pawned. But she pulled out every stop of the feminine organ,

the clarion, the stopped diapason, flute, bird-stop, _vox humana_, and,

lastly, the tremolo stop. He might say whatever he liked; _she_ said

whatever _she_ liked. A man does not try to arrest the iron arm of

necessity, or to avert it; he calmly awaits its stroke; a woman tries

to struggle away from its grip, at any rate for a few hours, before it

encircles her. It was in vain that Siebenkæs quietly and simply asked

her if she knew what else was to be done. To questions of this sort,

there float up and down in women's heads not one complete answer, but

thousands of half answers, which are supposed to amount to a whole one,

just as in the differential calculus an infinite number of straight

lines go to form a curved one. Some of these unripe, half-formed,

fugitive, mutually auxiliary answers were----

"He shouldn't have changed his name, and he would have had his mother's

money by this time."

"Of course, he might borrow."

"Look at all his clients, well off and comfortable, and he won't ask

them to pay him."

"He never dreams of asking a fee for defending the infanticide."

"And he shouldn't spend so much money." "He needn't have paid that

half-term's rent in advance." For the latter would have kept him going

for a day or two, you see!

It is always a vain task to oppose the "minority of one" of the

complete and true answer to the immense majority of feminine partial

proofs of this sort; women know, at any rate, thus much of the law of

Switzerland, that four half or invalid witnesses outweigh one whole or

valid one.[41] But the best way of confuting them is, to let them say

what they have got to say, and not utter a word yourself; they're

certain to diverge, before very long, into subsidiary or accessory

matters, which you yield to them, confuting them, as regards the real

subject of argument, simply by action. This is the only species of

confutation which they ever forgive. Siebenkæs, unfortunately,

attempted to apply the surgical bandage of philosophy to Lenette's two

principal members, her head and her heart, and therefore commenced as

follows--

"Dear wife, in the parish church you sing against worldly riches, like

the rest of the congregation, and yet you have them fixed on your heart

as firmly as your brooch. Now, I don't go to a church, it's true, but I

have a pulpit in my own breast, and I prize one single happy moment

more than the whole of this pewter dirt. Tell me truly now, has your

immortal heart been pained by the tragical fate of the soup-tureen, or

was it only your pericardium? The doctors prescribe tin, in powder, for

worms; and may not this miserable tin, which we have broken into little

pieces and swallowed, have had a similar effect on the abominable worms

of the heart? Collect yourself, and think of our cobbler here, does his

soup taste any the worse to him out of his painted iron _saucière_

because his bit of roast meat is eaten out of it too? You sit behind

that pincushion of yours, and can't see that society is mad, and drinks

coffee, tea, and chocolate out of different cups, and has particular

kinds of plates for fruit, for salad, and for herrings, and particular

sorts of dishes for hares, fish, and poultry. And I say that it will

get madder and madder as time goes on, and order as many kinds of fruit

plates from the china shops as there are different fruits in the

gardens--at least, I should do it myself; and if I were a crown prince,

or a grand master, I should insist upon having lark dishes and lark

knives, snipe dishes and snipe knives; neither would I carve the haunch

of a stag of sixteen upon any plate I had once had a stag of eight

upon. The world is a fine madhouse, and one gets up and preaches his

false doctrine in it when another has done, just as they do in a Quaker

meeting. So the Bedlamites think that only two follies are veritable

follies, follies which are past, and follies which are yet to come--old

follies and new; but I would show them that theirs partake of the

nature of both."

Lenette's only reply was an inexpressibly _gentle_ request: "Oh!

please, Firmian, do _not_ sell the pewter."

"Very well, then, I shan't!" (he answered, with a bitter satirical joy

at having got the brilliant neck of the pigeon fairly into the noose

which he had so long had ready baited for it). "The emperor Antoninus

sent his real silver plate to the mint, so that I might surely send

mine; but just as you like: I don't care twopence. Not an ounce of it

shall be old; I shall merely pawn! I'm much obliged to you for the

suggestion; and if I only hit the eagle's tail on St. Andrew's Day, or

the imperial globe, I can redeem the whole of it in a minute--I mean

with the money of the prize; at all events, the salad-bowl and the

soup-tureen. I think you're quite right. Old Sabel's in the house, is

she not? She can take the things and bring back the money."

She let it be so now. The shooting-match on St. Andrew's Day was her

Fortunatus's wishing-cap, the wooden wings of the eagle were as waxen

flying-apparatus fixed on to her hopes, the powder and shot were the

flower-seeds of her future blossoms of peace (as they are to crowned

heads also). Thou poor soul, in many senses of the word! But the poor

hope incredibly more than the rich; therefore it is that poor devils

are more apt to catch the infection of lotteries than the rich--just as

they are to catch the plague and other epidemics.

Siebenkæs--who looked down with contempt not only on the loss of his

household goods, but on the loss of his money--was secretly resolved

to leave the trash at the pawnbroker's, unredeemed for ever, like

a state-bond, even though he should chance to be king (at the

shooting-match), and convert the transaction into a regular sale some

future day, when he happened to be passing the shop.

After a few bright quiet days Peltzstiefel came again to make an

evening call. Amid the manifold embargoes laid upon their supplies, the

risks attending their smuggling operations, and as a tear or a sigh was

laid as a tax which _must_ necessarily be paid upon every loaf of

bread, Firmian had had no time, to say nothing of inclination, to

remember his jealousy. In Lenette's case, matters were necessarily

exactly reversed; and if she really has any love for Stiefel, it must

grow faster on his money-dunghill than on the advocate's field all over

wells of hunger. The Schulrath's eye was not one of those which read

the troubles of a household in a minute, though they are masked by

smiling faces; he noticed nothing of the kind. And for that very reason

it came to pass that this friendly trio spent a happy hour free from

clouds, during which, though the sun of happiness did not shine, yet

the moon of happiness (hope and memory) rose shimmering in their sky.

Moreover, Siebenkæs had the enjoyment of being provided with a

cultivated listener, who could follow and appreciate the jingle of the

bells on the jester's cap, the trumpet fanfares of his Leibgeberish

sallies. Lenette could neither follow nor appreciate them in the very

least, and even Peltzstiefel didn't understand him when he _read_ him,

but only when he _heard him talk_. The two men at first talked only of

persons, not of things, as women do; only that they called their

chronique scandaleuse by the name of History of Literature and Men of

Letters. For literary men like to know every little trait and

peculiarity of a great author--what clothes he wears, and what his

favourite dishes are. For similar reasons, women minutely observe every

little trait and peculiarity of any crown princess who happens to pass

through the town, even to her ribbons and fringes. From literary men

they passed to scholarship; and then all the clouds of this life melted

away, and in the land of learning, the fair realm of science, the

downcast sorrowful head, wrapped and veiled in the black Lenten

altar-cloth of hardship and privation, is lifted up once more. The soul

inhales the mountain air of its native land, and looks down from the

lofty peak of Pindus upon its poor bruised and wounded body lying

beneath--that body which it has to drag and bear about, sighing

under its weight. When some dunned, needy scholar, some skin-and-bone

reading-master, a poor curate with five children, or a baited and

badgered tutor, is lying woeful and wretched--every nerve quivering

under some instrument of torture--and a brother of his craft, plagued

by just as many instruments of torture as himself, comes and argues and

philosophises with him a whole evening, and tells him all the latest

opinions of the literary papers, then truly the sand-glass which marks

the hours of the torture[42] is laid on its side--Orpheus comes, all

bright and shining, with the lyre of knowledge in his hand, into the

psychic hell of the two brethren in office, the sad tears vanish from

their brightening eyes, the snakes of the furies twine into graceful

curls, the Ixion's wheel rolls harmoniously to the lyre, and these two

poor Sisyphuses sit resting quietly on their stones and listen to the

music. But the poor curate's, the reading-master's, the scholar's, good

wife, what is her comfort in her misery? She has none except her

husband, who ought, therefore, to be very tender to all her

shortcomings.

The reader was made aware in the first book that Leibgeber had sent

three programmes from Bayreuth. Stiefel brought the one, by Dr. Frank,

with him, and asked Siebenkæs to write a notice of it for the

'Kuhschnappel Heavenly Messenger.' He also took out of his pocket

another little book, to receive its sentence. The reader will hail both

these works with gladness, seeing that my hero and his has no money in

the house, and will be able to live for a day or two by reviewing them.

The second manuscript, which was in a roll, was entitled: 'Lessingii,

Emilia Galotti. Pro gymnasmatis loco latine reddita et publice acta,

moderante J. H. Steffens. Cellis 1788.'

It seems that a good many of the subscribers to the 'Heavenly

Messenger' have complained of the length of time which elapsed before

this work was noticed, drawing disadvantageous comparisons between the

'Messenger' and the 'Universal German Library;' for the latter,

notwithstanding the greatness of its universal German circulation,

notices good works within a few years of their birth--sometimes even as

early as the third year of their existence--so that the favourable

notice can frequently be bound up with the work, the first paper-covers

of it not being worn out before. The reason, however, why the 'Heavenly

Messenger' did not, and in fact could not, review more of the books of

the year 1788, was, that it was not until five years after that date

that it--first saw the light itself.

"Don't you think," said Siebenkæs, in a friendly manner to

Peltzstiefel, "that if I'm going to write proper notices of Messrs.

Frank and Steffens here, my wife should take care not to make a

thundering noise, swishing away with her broom at my back?"

"That might really be a matter of very considerable importance," said

Stiefel, gravely. Upon which a playful and somewhat abridged report of

the proceedings in the household action of inhibition was laid before

him. Wendeline fixed her kindly eyes on Peltzstiefel's face, striving

to read the _Rubrum_ (the red title), and the _Nigrum_ (the black body

matter) of his judgment there before it was pronounced. Both colours

were there. But though Stiefel's bosom heaved with genuine sighs of the

deepest affection for her, he nevertheless addressed her as follows--

"Madame Siebenkæs, this really won't do at all; for God hath not

created anything nobler than a scholar sitting at his writing. Hundreds

of thousands of people, ten times told, are sitting in every quarter of

the globe, as if on school-forms before him, and to all of these he has

to speak. Errors held by the wisest and cleverest people he has to

eradicate: ages, long since gone to dust and passed away, with those

who lived in them, he has to describe with accuracy and minuteness;

systems, the most profound and the most complex, he has to confute and

overthrow, or otherwise to invent and establish, himself. His light has

to pierce through massy crowns, through the Pope's triple tiara,

through Capuchin hoods and through wreaths of laurel--to pierce them

all and enlighten the brains within. This is his work; and this work he

can perform. But Madame Siebenkæs, what a strain on his faculties! What

a grand sustained effort is necessary! It is a hard matter and a

difficult to set up a book in type, but harder still to write it! Think

what the strain must have been when Pindar wrote, and Homer, earlier

still--I mean in the 'Iliad'--and so with one after another, down to

our own day. Is it any wonder, then, that great writers, in the

terrible strain and absorption of all their ideas, have often scarcely

known where they were, what they were doing, or what they would be at;

that they were blind and dumb, and insensible to everything but what

was perceived by the _five interior spiritual senses_, like blind

people, who see beautifully in their dreams, but in their waking state

are, as we have said, blind! This state of absorbedness and strain it

is which I consider to explain how it was that Socrates and Archimedes

could stand and be completely unconscious of the storm and turmoil

going on around them; how Cardanus in the profundity of his meditation

was unconscious of his Chiragra; others of the gout; one Frenchman of a

great conflagration, and a second Frenchman of the death of his wife."

"There, you see," said Lenette, much delighted, in a low voice to her

husband, "how can a learned gentleman possibly hear his wife when she's

at her washing and scrubbing?"

Stiefel, unmoved, went on with the thread of his argument: "Now, a fire

of this description can only be kindled in absolute and uninterrupted

calm. And this is the reason why all the great artists and men of

letters in Paris live nowhere but in the Rue Ste. Victoire; the other

streets are all too noisy. And it is hence that no smiths, tinkers, or

tinmen, are allowed to work in the street where a professor lives."

"No TINMEN especially," added Siebenkæs, very gravely. "It should

always be remembered that the mind cannot entertain more than

half-a-dozen of ideas at a time; so that if the idea of noise should

make its appearance as a wicked seventh, of course some one or other of

the previous ideas, which might otherwise have been followed up or

written down, takes its departure from the head altogether."

Indeed Stiefel made Lenette give him her hand as a pledge that she

would always stand still, like Joshua's sun, while Firmian was smiting

the foe with pen and scourge.

"Haven't I often asked the bookbinder myself," she said, "not to hammer

so hard upon his books, because my husband would hear him when he was

making _his_." However, she gave the Schulrath her hand, and he went

away contented with their contentment, leaving them quite hopeful of

quieter times.

But, ye dear souls, of how little use to you is this state of peace,

seeing ye are on half-pay and starving in this cold, empty, orphan

hospital of an earth--how little will it help you in these dim

labyrinthian wanderings of your destiny, of which even the Ariadne

clue-threads all turn to nets and snares? How long will the poor's

advocate manage to live on the produce of the pawned pewter, and on the

price of the two reviews which he is going to write? Only, we are all

like the Adam of the epic, and take our first night to be the day of

judgment, and the setting of the sun for the end of the world. We

sorrow for our friends, just as if there were no brighter future

YONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter future

HERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

CHAPTER VI.

MATRIMONIAL JARS--EXTRA LEAFLET ON THE LOQUACITY OF WOMEN--MORE

PLEDGING--THE MORTAR AND THE SNUFF-MILL--A SCHOLAR'S KISS--ON

THE CONSOLATIONS OF HUMANITY--CONTINUATION OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER.

This chapter commences at once with pecuniary difficulties. The

wretched, leaky Danaid's bucket which our good couple had to use for

washing their groschen or two, their grains of gold-dust--few and far

between as they were--out of the sands of their Pactolus, had always

run dry again in the course of a couple of days, or of three at the

outside. On this occasion, however, they had something certain to go

upon, namely, the reviews of the two works; they could count upon four

florins certainly, if not upon five.

Early next day, after his morning kiss, Firmian seated himself upon his

critical judgment-bench again, and proceeded to pass his sentences. He

might have written an epic poem, so light were the trade-winds which

had hitherto been prevalent during the early hours of the day. From

eight o'clock in the morning till eleven in the forenoon, he was

engaged in holding up to the world in a favourable light the programme

of Dr. Frank of Pavia, which was entitled: 'Sermo Academicus de civis

medici in republica conditione atque officiis, ex lege præipue erutis.

Auct. Frank. 1785.' He criticised, praised, blamed, and made extracts

from this little production, till he thought he had covered enough

paper to earn what would suffice to redeem the pawned herring-dish,

salad-bowl, sauce-boat, and plates--his views on the work occupying one

sheet, four pages, and fifteen lines.

The morning had passed so pleasantly, in holding Vehmgericht in this

manner, that he thought he might as well go on, and hold another in the

afternoon on the other book. He had never ventured upon this before; in

the afternoons he had done advocate's work, not reviewer's, appearing

in the character of defendant (_maker_ of defence), not of fiscal

(prosecutor). He had ample reason for this, seeing that every afternoon

girls and maid-servants came with bonnets and caps, and with _mouths_

full of conversational treasures, which they at once unpacked; richer

in language than the Arabs, who have only a thousand _words_ to express

the same idea, these young women had a thousand _idioms_ for it, or

different ways of putting it;--and, as an organ when it's out of order,

immediately begins to cipher on twenty of its pipes or so at a time as

soon as you begin to work the bellows, though no notes may be pressed

down, so would they the moment the bellows of their lungs was set

a-going. He didn't mind this, however, seeing that at the particular

hours to which these feminine alarum clocks were set, he let his own

juristical alarum go rattling off too, and during the arguing of

Lenette's cases, went on with the arguing of his. He wasn't disturbed

by this; he maintained: "A lawyer is not to be put out, he can open and

close his sentences when he chooses--his periods are long tapeworms,

and can be lengthened or cut down with impunity--for each segment of

them is itself a worm, each comma a period."

But reviewing was another matter, and couldn't be done so well. At the

same time, I shall here faithfully transcribe for the benefit of the

unlearned (the learned have read the review long ago), so much as he

actually did manage to get done after his dinner. He wrote down the

title of Steffen's Latin translation of "Emilia Galotti," and proceeded

as follows--

"This translation meets a want which we have long experienced. It is,

indeed, a striking phenomenon, that so few of the German classics have

as yet been translated into Latin for the use of scholars, who, for

their part, have supplied us with German versions of nearly all the

Greek and Roman classic authors. The German nation can point to

literary productions of its own which are quite worthy of perusal by

scholars and by linguists, who, although they can translate them, do

not understand them, because they are not written in Latin.

Lichtenberg's 'Pocket Calendar' has appeared simultaneously in a German

edition--for the English, who are studying German--and in a French for

our own _haute noblesse_. But why should not German original works, and

even the very 'Calendar' itself, be made known to linguists and to

scholars by means of a good and faithful Latin translation? There can

be no doubt that they would be the very first to be struck by the great

resemblance which may be traced between the odes of Ramler and those of

Horace, if the former were but translated. The reviewer must confess

that it has always been matter of surprise, as well as regret, to him

that but two correct editions of Klopstock's 'Messiah' have as yet

appeared, the original edition and his own--and that there is no Latin

edition of it for scholars--(Lessing having scarcely translated the

'Invocation' in his miscellaneous writings)--nor one in the curial

style for lawyers, nor a plain prose one for the commercial world, nor

one in Jew-German for the Jewish community."

When he had got thus far, he was compelled to stop, because a housemaid

_wouldn't_ stop, but went on reiterating what her mistress had gone on

re-iterating, namely, how her night-cap was to be done up; twenty times

did she sketch the ground-plan and elevation of the said cap, and laid

weight on the necessity for speedy execution. Lenette answered her

tautologies with equivalent ones, paying her back to the full in her

own coin. Scarce was the housemaid out at the door, when the reviewer

said--

"I haven't written a word while that windmill was clacking. Lenette,

tell me, is it really a positive impossibility for a woman to say,

'It's four o'clock,' instead of 'The four quarters to four have gone?'

Can no woman say, 'The head-clout will be ready to-morrow,' and then an

end of the matter? Can no woman say, 'I want a dollar for it,' and

there an end of the story? Nor, 'Run in again to-morrow!' and no more

about it? Can _you_ not do it, for instance?"

Lenette answered very coldly, "Oh! of course you think everybody thinks

just as you think yourself!"

Lenette had two feminine bad habits, which have sent millions of male

rockets, or pyrotechnic serpents--namely, curses--up skywards. The

first was, that whenever she gave the servant an order, she did it as

if it were a memorial in two copies, and then went out of the room with

her and repeated the order in question three or four times more in the

passage. The second was, that let Siebenkæs shout a thing to her, as

distinctly as man could, her first answer was, "What?" or, "What do you

say?" Now, I not only advise ladies always to demand a "second of

exchange" of this sort when they are in any embarrassment for an

answer, and I laud them for so doing; but in cases where what is

required of them is attention, not the truth, this _ancora_ and _bis_

which they cry to a speaker who is anxious not to waste time, is as

cumbersome as it is unnecessary. Matters of this kind are trifles in

married life only so long as the sufferer by them does not complain of

them. But when they have been found fault with they are worse than

deadly sins, and felonies, and adulteries--seeing that they occur much

more frequently.

If the author were disturbed at his work by pleonasms of the above

description; what he would do would be, not deliver a serious lecture,

but (because this is a good opportunity) write the following

EXTRA LEAFLET ON FEMALE LOQUACITY.

"The author of the work on 'Marriage' has said, 'A woman who does not

talk is a stupid woman.' But it is easier to be his encomiast than his

disciple. The cleverest women are often silent with women, and the most

stupid and most silent are often both with men. On the whole, this

statement, which has been applied to the male sex, is true also of the

female, namely, that those who think most have least to say; as frogs

cease croaking when a light is brought to the side of their pond.

Moreover, the extreme talkativeness of women is a result of the

sedentary nature of their occupations. Men, whose work is sedentary,

such as tailors, shoemakers, weavers, have in common with women not

only their hypochondriac fancies, but also their loquacity.

"The little work-tables, where feminine fingers are employed, are also

the playgrounds of the feminine imagination, and their needles become

little magic wands, wherewith they transform their rooms into isles of

spirits filled with dreams. Hence it is that a letter or a book

distracts a woman who is in love more than the knitting of a whole pair

of stockings. Savages say that the monkeys refrain from talking that

they may not be made to work; but many a woman talks twice as much when

she is working as when she is not.

"I have devoted much thought to the question, what purpose this

peculiarity subserves in the economy of the universe. At first it might

strike us that Nature has ordained these re-iterations of that which

has been already said with a view to the development of metaphysical

truths: for, as demonstration, according to Jacobi and Kant, is merely

a series, or progression, of identical propositions, it is evident that

women, who always proceed from the same thing to the same thing, are

continually demonstrating. There can be no doubt, however, that the

object which Nature has chiefly had in view is the following. Accurate

observers of nature have pointed out that the reason why the leaves of

trees keep up their constant fluttering motion is that the atmosphere

may be purified by this perpetual flagellation--this oscillation of the

leaves having very much the effect of a light and gentle breeze.[43] It

would, however, be very wonderful had Nature--always economising her

forces, Nature, who never does anything in vain--ordained this much

longer oscillation, this seventy years' wagging of the feminine tongue,

to no definite purpose. For the purpose in question, however, we have

not far to seek. It is the same which is subserved by the quivering of

the leaves of trees. The endless, regular, unceasing beat of the

feminine tongue is to assist in agitating and stirring up the

atmosphere, which would otherwise become putrescent. The moon has her

ocean of water, and the feminine head has its ocean of air, to stir

into salubrity and to keep in perpetual freshness. Hence a universal

Pythagorean noviciate would, sooner or later, give rise to epidemics,

and Chartreuses of nuns would become pesthouses. Hence it is that

diseases of the pestiferous type are less frequent among civilised

nations, who talk the most. And hence Nature's beneficent arrangement

that it is exactly in the largest cities--and moreover in the

winter--and moreover indoors--and in large assemblages--that women talk

most, inasmuch as it is exactly in these places and at these periods

that the atmosphere is most impure, and charged with the largest

proportion of carbonic acid and other products of respiration, &c.,

requiring to be thoroughly fanned and set in motion. And, indeed,

Nature here overthrows all artificial barriers and impediments;

for, although many European women have endeavoured to imitate

those of America--who fill their mouths with water in order to keep

silence--and, while making calls, fill theirs with tea or coffee, yet

these fluids have been found rather to facilitate than to prevent the

free flow of feminine speech.

"I trust that in this I am far from being like the narrow-minded

teleologists, who, to every grand sun-path, or sun-orbit of Nature,

must always be appending and intercalating little subsidiary

foot-tracks and ends in view. Such persons might permit themselves the

supposition (_I_ should be ashamed to do so) that the oscillation of

the female tongue, the use of which is sufficiently apparent in the

motion which it communicates to the atmosphere, may possibly serve to

give typical illustration to some thought or idea of a spiritual

nature--_e. g_. the female soul itself, perhaps.

"This belongs to that class of things with respect to which Kant has

said that they can neither be proved nor disproved. I myself should

rather incline, however, to the opinion that the talking of women is an

indication of the cessation of thought and mental activity--as in a

good mill the warning bell only rings when there is no corn left in the

hopper. Moreover, every husband knows that tongues are attached to

women's heads in order to give due notice, by their clanging, that some

contradiction, something irregular or impossible, is dominating in

them.[44] Similarly, H. Müller's calculating machine has a little bell

in it, which rings merely to give notice that some error has occurred

in a calculation. However, it now remains for the natural philosopher

to prosecute this inquiry, and to determine to what extent my views may

prove to be erroneous."

I may just mention that the above leaflet was written by the advocate.

He did not finish his review till the following morning. He had

intended to go on writing down his ideas on the subject of the

translation of Emilia Galotti till the money coming to him as the price

of the ideas should be enough to pay for new toes to his boots--Fecht

asked a sheet and a half for doing the pair--but he had not time for

this, as he was obliged to calculate the price of his notice by the

compositor's sight-rule, and get the money for it that very day.

The reviews were sent to the editor; the critical invoice amounted to

three florins four groschen and five pfennige. Strange! we smile when

we see the spiritual and the corporeal, intellect and hard cash, pain

and pecuniary compensation, stated as sums in proportion; but is not

our whole life an equation, a sum in "partnership" between soul and

body; and is not all action _upon_ us corporeal, and all _re_action

_from_ us spiritual?

The servant-girl brought back only "kind regards;" not the leaves of

silver which his ink should have crystallised into. Peltzstiefel had

not given the matter a thought. He was so absorbed in his studies

that he was indifferent to his own money, and blind to the poverty of

other people. He was capable, indeed, of noticing a _hiatus_; but it

must be in a manuscript--not in his own or other people's shoes,

stockings, &c. An inward fire blinded this fortunate man to the

phosphorescence of the rotten wood around him. And happy is every actor

in the school-theatricals of life who finds the lofty inward delusion

suffice to compensate him for the delusions without, or to hide them

from his view;--who is so carried away by the enthusiasm with which he

enters into and renders his spiritual _rôle_, that the coarse daubs of

landscapes of the scenery seem to bloom, and the branches to rustle in

the refreshing showers (of peas) from the rain-box--and who does not

wake to reality at the shifting of the scenes.

But this beautiful blindness of the Rath was very distressing to our

two dear friends; their little constellation, which was to have shone

in their evening sky, fell all down in meteoric drops upon the earth. I

do not blame Stiefel; he had an ear for distress, though not an eye.

But ye rich and great ones of the earth, who, helpless in the

honeycombs of your pleasures, swimming with clogged wings in your

melted sugar of roses, do not find it an easy matter to move your hand,

put it into your money-bag, and take out the wage of him who helped to

fill your honey-cells--an hour of judgment will strike at last for

_you_, and ask you if ye were worthy to _live_, let alone to live a

life of pleasure, when ye avoid even the _trifling_ trouble of _paying_

the poor who have undergone the _immense_ trouble of _earning_. But ye

would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent,

indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often

inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start

of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home

without his money--the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes,

and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family.

The advocate, therefore, put on his wicked silverising face again and

went prying about into every corner with his eyeglass, making himself

into a species of pressgang of the furniture. As a king or an English

minister sits up in his bed at night, rests his head on his hand, and

considers what commodity or what tree-stem full of birch-sap he may

stick his winetap of a new tax into, or (in another metaphor) so cut

the peat of taxation that new peat may grow in its place: thus did

Siebenkæs. With his letter of marque in his hand he scanned minutely

every flag that hove in sight; he lifted up his shaving-dish and set it

down; he shook the paralytic arms of an old chair till they cracked

again--he subjected it to a trial more severe, by sitting down in it

and getting up again.--I interrupt my period to observe _en passant_

that Lenette fully understood the danger of this conscription and

measuring of the children of the land, and that she protested

continuously and unavailingly against this game of pledges with

Job-like lamentations.--He also took down from its hook an old yellow

mirror, with a gilt leaf-pattern frame, which hung in the bedroom

opposite the green-railed bed, examined its wooden case and the back of

it, moved the glass of it up and down a little and then hung it up

again--an old firedog and some bedroom crockery he did not touch; he

whipt the lid off a porcelain butter-boat, made, according to the

plastic art of the period, in the shape of a cow, and glanced into the

inside of it, but set it back, empty and full of dust, as an ornament

on the mantelpiece again; he weighed, longer and with both hands, a

spice-mortar, and put it back again into the cupboard.

He looked more and more dangerous, and more and more merry; he drew out

with both arms the drawer of a wardrobe, shoved back table-napkins, and

begun to overhaul a mourning-dress of checked cotton a little ----. But

here Lenette flew out, seized him by his overhauling arm, and cried,

"Why not, indeed! But, please God, it shall _not_ come to _that_ with

_me_!"

He shut the drawer quietly, opened the cupboard again, and carefully

lifted the mortar on to the table, saying, "Oh! very well, it matters

little to me, it comes all to the same thing; the mortar will have to

take its departure." By covering this bell of shame with his open hand

by way of a damper, he was able to take out the pestle, its clapper,

without producing any ring or clang. He had been perfectly aware all

the time that she would rather pawn the garment of her soul (_i. e_.

her body) than the checked garment of that garment; but it was of set

purpose that, like the Court of Rome, he demanded the entire hand that

he might be the more likely to obtain a single finger of it--in this

case the mortar--and moreover he hoped the mere frequency with which he

reiterated his determination would save him the necessity of stating

any reasons, and that he would familiarise Lenette with the bugbear and

hobgoblin by keeping it continually before her eyes (I mean, with his

design upon the mortar). Wherefore he went on to say, "The fact is,

that it's very little that we have to pound in the course of a

twelvemonth, except when we have a quarter of a fat beast; at the same

time, just give me some idea why you're so anxious to keep the checked

gown--what on earth is the use of it? The only time you can wear it

will be when I depart this life. Now, Lenette, that's a terrible sort

of idea; I can't stand it. Coin the dress into silver--eliminate it

altogether; I'll send two pairs of mourning-buckles of mine along with

it; I hope I may never have anything to buckle with them again."

She stormed without bounds and preached with much wisdom against all

"careless, thoughtless householders;" and this for the very reason,

that she felt it was only too probable that he would soon take every

article of furniture in the place (which he had been feeling and

valuing, like a person buying bullocks) to the slaughter-house,

and--goodness gracious! the checked dress among the rest. "I had rather

starve," she cried, "than throw away that mortar for a mere song. The

Schulrath is sure to be here to-morrow evening, with the money for your

reviews."

"Now you begin to talk sense," said he; and he carried the pestle

horizontally in both his hands into the bedroom, and laid it on to

Lenette's pillow--next bringing the mortar, and placing it on his own.

"If people should happen to hear it ring," he said, "they would think I

wanted to turn it into silver, as we were pounding nothing in it; and I

shouldn't like that."

The united capital contained in his greenish-yellow cotton-purse, and

her large money-bag (which she wore at her girdle), amounted to about

three groschen, good money. In the evening there would have to be a

groschen-loaf bought, for cash, and the remainder of the metallic-seed

must be sown in the morning to grow the breakfast- and dinner-crop. The

servant-girl went out for the bread, but came back with the groschen

and with the Job's message, "There's nothing left at the bakers' shops

at this time of night but two-groschen loaves; father (the cobbler

Fecht) couldn't get any either." This was lucky; the advocate could

enter into partnership with the shoemaker, and it would be easy for

these partners, by each contributing a groschen to the partnership

funds, to obtain a two-groschen loaf. The Fechts were asked if they

agreed to this. The cobbler, who made no secret of his daily

bankruptcies, answered--

"With all my heart. G--d d--n me! (Heaven forgive me for swearing) if I

and the whole crew of young tatterdemalions in the place have had a

scrap of anything to fill our mouths with the whole blessed day but

waxed-ends." In short, this coalition of the _tiers état_ with the

learned estates put an end to the famine, and the covenanting parties

broke the loaf in two and weighed it in a just balance, it being itself

both the weight and the thing weighed. Ah! ye rich! Ye, with your

manna, or bread sent from heaven, little think how indispensable to

poverty are small weights, apothecaries' measure, heller-loaves,[45] a

dinner for eight kreuzers (and your shirt washed into the bargain); and

a broken-bread shop, where mere crumbs and black-bread powder are

to be had for money; and how the comfort of a whole family's evening

depends on the fact that your hundredweights are on sale in lots of

half-an-ounce.

They ate, and were content. Lenette was in good humour because she had

gained her point. At night the advocate put the things which were to be

pawned upon a soft chair. In the morning she facilitated his writing by

keeping very quiet. It was a good omen, however, that she did not put

the mortar back into the cupboard. And Siebenkæs fired off various

queries out of the said bomb-mortar in parabolic curves. He knew

perfectly well that the Loretto- and Harmonica-bell in question must

march that day or the next over the frontier for a small pecuniary

_Abzug-geld_.[46] Women always like to put everything off till the very

last possible moment.

Peltzstiefel came in that evening. It was both ridiculous and natural

to expect that the first thing the editor of the 'Heavenly Messenger'

would do would be to pay the critic his wages, so that he might at

least be able to set before his editor a candlestick with a candle in

it, and a beer-glass containing beer. Nothing can be more cruel than an

anxiety of this sort, because this kind of shame breaks in a moment all

the springs in the human machine. Siebenkæs wouldn't let it trouble his

head, because he knew Stiefel wouldn't let it trouble his. But Lenette

was to be pitied, inasmuch as the blushes of her shame were heightened

by her fondness for Stiefel! At last the Rath put his hand in his

pocket. They thought now he was going to produce the review-money; but

all he took out was his snuff-machine, his tobacco-grater, and he dived

back into his coat-tail pocket for half-an-ounce of rappee to put upon

this little chopping-bench. But he had grated the half-ounce already.

He searched his breeches-pockets for money to send for another

half-ounce. Truly--and here he swore an oath for which he would have

incurred a fine had he been in England--he had sent, like an ass, not

only his purse but also the money for the reviews, carefully counted

out and neatly wrapped in paper, with his breeches--they were his plush

ones--to the tailor's. He said it wasn't the first time, and it was a

lucky job that the tailor was an honest man; the only thing was, he

hadn't noticed how much there was in his purse. He innocently requested

Lenette to "send and get him an ounce of rappee; he would repay her

next morning, when he sent the money for the reviews." Siebenkæs

roguishly added, "And send for some beer at the same time, dear." He

and Stiefel looked out of window; but he saw that his poor wife--her

bosom torn with sighs, and suffering _peine forte et dure_--stole into

the bedroom and noiselessly put the spice-mill into her apron.

After a good half-hour, rappee, beer, money, and happiness entered the

room; the bell-metal of the mortar was transformed into sustenance for

the inward man, and the bell in question had been somewhat like the

little altar-bell, which in this case, besides _announcing_ a

transubstantiation, or transformation of the substance of the bread, as

it does in the Roman Catholic Church, had _undergone_ one itself. Their

blood no longer gurgled among rocks and stones, but flowed softly and

tranquilly along, by meadows, and over silver sands. Such is man. When

he is in the depths of misery, the first happy moment lifts him out;

when he is at the height of bliss, the remotest sorrowful moment,

even though it is down beneath the horizon, casts him to earth.

No great man, who has _maîtres de cuisine_, clerks of the cellar,

capon-stuffers, and confectioners, has any true enjoyment of the

pleasure it is to give and receive hospitality; he gets and gives no

thanks. But a poor man and his poor guest, with whom he halves his loaf

and his can, are united by a mutual bond of gratitude.

The evening wound a soft bandage about the pain of the morning. The

poppy-juice of sixty drops of happiness was taken hourly, and the

medicine had a gently soothing and exhilarating power. When his old,

kind friend was leaving, Siebenkæs gave him a hearty, grateful kiss for

his cheering visit, Lenette standing by, with the candle in her hand.

Her husband, as some little compensation to her for having pounded her

little fit of obstinacy to groats in the mortar, said to her in an

off-hand, cheerful manner, "You give him one, too." The blushes

mantled on her cheeks like fire, and she leant back, as if she had a

mouth to avoid already. It was quite clear that, if she had not been

obliged to perform the office of torch-bearer, she would have fled to

her room on the spot. The Rath stood before her beaming with

affectionate friendliness--something like a white winter-landscape in

sunshine--waiting till--she should give him the kiss. The fruitlessness

of this expectation, and the prematureness of her bending her head out

of the way, began to vex him a little at last. Somewhat hurt, but still

beaming as affectionately as ever, he said--

"Am I not worth a kiss, Madam Siebenkæs?"

Her husband said, "Surely you don't expect my wife to _give_ you the

kiss. She would set her hair and everything in a blaze with the

candle!"

Upon this, Peltzstiefel inclined his head slowly and cautiously, and at

the same time commandingly, down to her mouth, and laid his warm lips

on hers, like the half of a stick of melted sealing-wax on the other

half. Lenette gave him more space, by bending back her head; yet it

must be said that while she held her left arm with the candle high up

in the air, for fear of fire, she did a good deal to push away the

Rath--another, more proximate, fire--politely with the other. When he

was gone, she was still just the least bit embarrassed. She moved about

with a certain floating motion, as though some great happiness was

buoying her up with its wings--the evening red was still bright on her

cheek, though the moon was high in the heavens: her eyes were bright,

but dreamy, seeming to notice nothing about her--her smiles came before

her words, and she spake very few--not the slightest allusion was made

to the mortar. She touched everything more gently, and looked out of

the window at the sky two or three times. She didn't seem to care to

eat more of the two-groschen loaf, and drank no beer, but only a glass

or two of water. Anybody else--myself for example--would have held up

his finger and sworn he was looking upon a girl who had just had a

first kiss from her sweetheart.

And I shouldn't have regretted having taken that oath had I seen the

sudden blush which suffused her face next day when the money for the

reviews and the snuff was brought. It was a miracle, and an

extraordinary piece of politeness, that Peltzstiefel should not have

forgotten about his having contracted this little loan--little debts of

two or three groschen always escaped his preoccupied memory. But rich

people, who always carry less money about them than the poor, and

therefore borrow from them, ought to inscribe trifling debts of this

sort on a memorial tablet, in their brain, because it is very wrong to

break into a poor devil's purse, who gets, moreover, no thanks for

these groschen of his which thus drop into the stream of Lethe.

* * * * *

Now, I beg to say, I should be happy to give two sheets of this

manuscript if the day of the shooting-match were but come, solely

because our dear couple build so upon it and upon its bird-pole. For

the position of these people is really going on from bad to worse; the

days of their destiny move with those of the calendar, from October on

to November, that is to say, from the end of summer to the beginning of

winter, and they find that moral frosts and nights get harder and

longer in the same ratio with those of the season. However, I must go

regularly on with my story.

I think there is no doubt that November, the month which is such a

_Novembriseur_ of the British, is the most horrible month of all the

year--for me it is a regular _Septembriseur_. I wish I could hybernate,

sleep, till the beginning of the Christmas month, December. The

November of '85 had, at the commencement of its reign, a dreadful

wheezing breath, a hand as cold as death, and an unpleasant lachrymal

fistula; in fact it was unendurable. The northeast wind, which in

summer it is so pleasant to hear blowing past one's ears, because one

knows it is a sure sign of settled weather, is, in autumn, only a sign

of steady cold. To our couple the weathercock was really a funeral

standard. Though they didn't exactly go out to the woods themselves

with baskets and barrows to pick up fallen branches and twigs, like the

poor day-labourer, they had to buy the stuff for firewood from the

wood-gatherers, by weight, as if it had been wood from the Indies, and

it had to be dried by the combustion of other wood before it would

burn. But this damp cold weather was more trying to the advocate's

stoicism, after all, than even to his purse; he couldn't run out and go

up a hill, and look about him, and seek in the heavens for that which

consoles and comforts the anxious and sorrowful, that which dissipates

the clouds which shroud our life, and shows us guiding nebulæ

(Magellan's clouds), if nothing else, gleaming through the fog-banks.

For when he could go up the Rabenstein, or some other hill, he could

get sight from thence of the aurora of the sun of happiness, though

that sun was under his horizon; the sorrows and torments of this

earthly life lay, writhing, like other vipers, in the clefts and

hollows beneath him, and no rattlesnake could rear itself with its

fangs up to his hill. Ah! there, in the free air, close to the ocean of

life which stretches on into the invisible distance of infinity, near

to the lofty heavens, the blue coal smoke of the stifling, suffocating

dwelling of our daily life cannot rise to us, we see its wreaths

hanging far down beneath; our sorrows drop, like leeches, from our

bleeding bosoms, and raised, for the time, above our woes, we stretch

our arms--no fetters on them now, though sore and marked, and bruised

with the galling iron--we stretch them out as if to soar in the pure

bright æther; we stretch them out, and fain would take to our bosom the

peaceful universe above us, we stretch them to the invisible eternal

Father, like children hastening home to Him--and we open them wider yet

to clasp our visible mother, created Nature, crying, "Oh take not this

solace, this comfort, away from me, when I am down there again among

the fog and the sorrow." And why is it that prisoners and the sick are

so wretched in their confinement? They are there shut up in their

holes, the clouds sail over them, they can only see the mountains far

away in the distance, these mountains whence, as from those of the

Polar regions in summer midnights, the sun, down below the horizon, can

be seen shining with a mild face, as if in slumber. But in this

wretched weather though Siebenkæs could not enjoy the consolations of

imagination, which bloom beneath the open sky, he could derive comfort

from reason, which thrives in the flower-pots of the window-sills. His

chief consolation, which I commend to everybody, was this: Man is under

the pressure of a necessity of two kinds--an every-day necessity,

which, everybody bears uncomplainingly, and a rare, or yearly-recurrent

necessity, which is only submitted to after struggles and complaints.

The daily and everlastingly recurrent necessity is this--that corn does

not ripen in winter--that we have not got wings, though so many

lower creatures have them--or that we cannot go and stand upon the

ring-shaped craters of the lunar mountains, and looking down into the

abysses, which are miles in depth, watch the marvellous and beautiful

effects of the setting sun's rays. The annual, or rarely recurrent,

necessity is that there is rainy weather when the corn is in

blossom--that there are a great many water-meadows of this world where

it is very bad walking, and that sometimes, because we have corns, or

no shoes, we cannot even walk anywhere. Only the annual necessity and

the daily are of exactly equal magnitude, and it is just as senseless

to murmur because we have paralysed limbs as because we have no wings.

All the PAST--and this alone is the subject of our sorrow--is of so

iron a necessity that in the eyes of a superior intelligence it is just

as senseless of an apothecary to mourn because his shop is burnt to the

ground as to sigh because he can't go botanising in the moon, although

there may be many things in the phials there which he has not got in

his.

I mean to introduce an extra leaflet here on the consolations which we

may meet with in this damp, chilly, draughty life of ours. Anybody who

may be annoyed at these brief digressions of mine, and is scarcely to

be consoled, let him seek consolation in this--

EXTRA LEAFLET ON CONSOLATION.

A time may, that is to say, _must_ come when it shall be held to be a

moral obligation not only to cease to torment other people, but to

cease to torment ourselves; a time must and will come when we shall

wipe away the greater part of our tears, even here on earth, were it

only from proper pride.

It is true, nature is so constantly drawing tears from our eyes, and

forcing sighs from our breasts, that a wise man can scarcely ever

wholly lay aside his _body's_ garb of mourning; but let his soul wear

none! For if it is a simple duty or merit to endure minor sorrows with

proper cheerfulness, it is likewise a merit, only a greater one, to

bear the greatest sorrows bravely, just as the same reason which

enjoins the forgiveness of small injuries is equally valid for the

forgiveness of the greatest.

What we have principally to contend against, and to treat with due

contempt, in sorrow, as in anger, is its paralysing poisonous

sweetness, which we are so loth to exchange for the exertion of

consoling ourselves and of exercising our reasoning faculties.

We must not expect Philosophy to produce, with one stroke of the

pen, the converse effect to that which Rubens produced, when he

converted a smiling child into a weeping one with one stroke of his

brush. It is sufficient if she converts the soul's deep mourning garb

into half-mourning; it is enough when I can say to myself, "I am

content to bear that share of my sorrow of which my philosophy has not

relieved me; but for her it would have been greater--the gnat's sting

would have been a wasp's."

It is only through the imagination, as from an electric condenser, that

even physical pain emits its sparks upon us. We would bear the severest

physical pains without a wince if they were not of longer duration than

a sixtieth part of a second; but we never really do have an hour of

pain to endure, but only a succession of sixtieth parts of a second of

pain, the sixty separate rays of which are concentrated into the focus

and burning-point of a second, and directed upon our nerves by the

imagination alone. The most painful part of corporeal pain is the

_in_corporeal part of it, that is to say, our own impatience, and our

delusive conviction that it will last for ever.

We all know for certain that we shall have given up grieving for many a

loss, in twenty, ten, or two years why do we not say to ourselves,

"Very well--if this is an opinion which I shall cease to hold in twenty

years' time,--I prefer to abandon it to-day, at once? Why must it take

me twenty years to abandon an error, when I need not hold it twenty

hours?"

When I awake from a dream which has painted for me an Otaheite on the

black background of the night, and find the flowery land melted away, I

scarcely sigh, and I think it was but a dream. How were it if I had

actually possessed this flowery island in waking life, and it had been

submerged in the sea by an earthquake? Why should I not, _then_ also,

say, "The island was but a dream"? Why am I more inconsolable for the

loss of a LONGER dream than for the loss of a SHORTER (for that is what

constitutes the distinction),--and why does man think a great loss less

necessary and less probable than a small?

The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing,

demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of

being vexed because it's past twelve o'clock, or because it's _not_

past, but only _just_ twelve o'clock. What nonsense! The passion wants

besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its

own,--a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let

his passions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain

what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when

he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they

have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for

all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of

lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!

When I was reading in Widman's 'Höfer Chronik' the account of the

fearful, bloody times of the thirty years' war, and, as it were, lived

them over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those

poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their

days--and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious

wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows

and drifting ice-floes dashing against them; and then, when I thought

"All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil

is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs"--I

was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for

_all_ times, and I asked, "Was, and is, then, this passing, cursory,

transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three

steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly

lamentation?" Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true

patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a

transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.

A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the

theologians would have it--it should make us proud. When the long,

heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts

are torn and bleeding--or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot

cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and

lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys

all burnt to cinders and dust--then let thy spirit be lifted up in

pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which

they fall, and let it say--

"Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an

immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to _thee_, thou torn

and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth--the

ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form

from vapour by convulsion--the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful

dream--I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the

breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that

the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death."

But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to

thyself this question, "If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy

sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save

such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the

immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he

distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and

our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy

dust against Him, and say, 'Almighty, be other than thou art!'"

But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which

there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow

for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when

we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and

when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we

picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps

these tears differ not.

CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER VI.

THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS--MORE PLEDGES--CHRISTIAN NEGLECT OF THE

STUDY OF JUDAISM--A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM

THE CLOUDS--THE AUCTION.

The St. Andrew's shooting-match will take place in the seventh

chapter: the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that

period--that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs

would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him

beforehand with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading

enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence,

read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and

said, "If _I_ am quite happy, why should _you_ be pitying me?" The

articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand

of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were

one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral

border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself

in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the

passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he

stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to

Lenette a substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in

order to accustom her to the idea. It was the "Censeo Carthaginem

delendam" (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used

to say daily in the senate after every speech.

Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare's

arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in

carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs

had the wisdom to say, before they went away, "Censeo Carthaginem

delendam," _i. e_. "Wouldn't it be better to pawn the checked calico?"

They could barely subsist for two days upon the dog and the chair.

And then the process of alchemical transmutation of metals was applied

to the shaving-basin and the bedroom crockery, which were converted

into table-money. Of course he previously said "Censeo." It is scarcely

worth the trouble, but I may just observe here how little fruit was

born by this branch of trade; it was rather a woody branch than a

fruit-bearing one.

The lean porcelain cow or butter-boat would scarcely have served as

their nourishing milch cow for more than a day, if she had not been

attended by seven potentates (that is to say, most miserable prints of

them), who went "into the bargain," but for whom the woman at the shop

added some melted butter. Wherefore he said "Censeo." Many of my

readers must remember my mentioning that, a short time ago, when he was

distributing sentences of death among the furniture, he did not take

very much notice of certain table-napkins which were lying beside the

checked calico dress. Now, however, he acted as screech-owl, or bird of

death, and gallows-priest to them also, and routed them out all but a

few. When they were gone, he remarked, in an incidental manner, shortly

before Martinmas Day, that the napkin-press was still to the fore,

though it was not very clear what was the use of it, as there was

nothing for it to press.

"If such a thing should be necessary," he said, "the press might very

well get leave of absence on private affairs, until _we_ get through

the smoothing-press, oiling-press, and napkin-press of destiny, and

come out all smooth and beautiful ourselves, and can stick the napkins

into our button-holes on their return." His first intention had even

been to reverse the order of the funeral procession, and put the press

in the van of it as _avant-courier_ of the napkins, and in that event

he would only have had to invert his syllogism (as well as his

procession) in this way: "I don't see what we can do with the napkins,

or how we're to press them and keep them smooth, till we get the press

home again."

I am most firmly convinced that the majority of people would have done

as Lenette did with reference to my trade-consul Siebenkæs, and his

Hanseatic confederation with everybody who dealt in anything--that is,

clasped her hands above her head, and said, "Oh! the thoughtless, silly

creature! he'll soon be a beggar at this rate: the beautiful

furniture!"

Firmian's constant answer was--

"You would have me kneel down and howl, and tear my coat in

lamentation, like a Jew--my coat, which is torn already and pull my

hair out by the roots--that hair, which terror frequently causes to

fall off in a single night. Isn't it enough if _you_ do the howling?

Are you not my appointed _præfica_ and keening-woman? Wife, I swear to

you, and that as solemnly as if I were standing on pig's bristles,[47]

that if it is the will of God, who has given me so light and merry a

heart--if it be His will that I am to go about the town with eight

thousand holes in my coat, and without a sole to either shoe or

stocking that I am to go on always getting poorer and poorer" (here his

eyes grew moist in spite of him, and his voice faltered), "may the

devil take me and lash me to death with the tuft of his tail if I leave

off laughing and singing; and anybody who pities me, I tell him to his

face, is an ass. Good heavens! the apostles, and Diogenes, and

Epictetus, and Socrates, had seldom a whole coat to their backs--never

such a thing as a shirt--and shall a creature such as I let a hair of

him turn grey for such a reason, in miserable PROVINCIALISTIC times

such as these?"

Right, my Firmian! Have a proper contempt for the narrow heart-sacs of

the big clothes-moths about you--the human furniture-boring worms. And

ye, poor devils, who chance to be reading me--whether ye be sitting in

colleges or in offices, or even in parsonage-houses, who perhaps

haven't got a hat without a hole in it to put on your heads, most

certainly haven't got a black one--rise above the effeminate

surroundings of your times to the grand Greek and Roman days, wherein

it was thought no disgrace to a noble human creature to have neither

clothes nor temple, like the statue of Hercules; take heed only that

your soul shares not the poverty of your outward circumstances; lift

your faces to heaven with pride--a sickly faint northern Aurora is

veiling it, but the eternal stars are breaking through the thin

blood-red storm!

It was but a few weeks now to the St. Andrew's Day shooting-match,

which was Lenette's consolation in all her troubles, and to which all

her wishes were directed; however, there came one day on which she was

something worse than melancholy--inconsolable.

This was Michaelmas: on that day the press was to have followed

Lenette's Salzburg emigrants, the napkins, as their lady superior; but

nobody in all the town would have anything to do with it. The sole

anchor of refuge was one Jew, because there was no species of animal

(in the shape of articles of merchandise) which did not flee to his

Noah's ark of a shop. Unfortunately, however, the day when the

napkin-press applied to him was a Jewish feast-day, which he kept more

strictly than ever he did his word. He said he would see about it

to-morrow.

Permit me, if you please, to take this opportunity of making a few

remarks of importance. Is it not a piece of most culpable negligence on

the part of the Government that, seeing the Jews are, as it were,

farmers-general and metal-kings of the Christians in German states, the

days of their feasts and fasts, and other times connected with their

worship, are not published and clearly made known for the benefit of

those very numerous persons who wish to borrow of them, or have any

business to transact with them? Those who suffer most from this

omission are just the upper circles of society, persons of birth and

rank, officials of high position; these are the persons who bring

papers and want money on Feasts of Haman, Feasts of Esther, of the

Destruction of the Temple, of the Rejoicing of the Law, and can't

obtain any. Surely the Jewish festivals, with the hours at which they

begin and end, ought to be given in every almanack--as they have

been fortunately, for a considerable time, in those of Berlin and

Bavaria--or in newspapers--or be proclaimed by the crier, and carefully

taught in schools. The Jew, indeed, has no need of a calendar of _our_

festivals, since we are always ready to put off and postpone, if he

likes, every Sunday of the year, though it were the first Sunday of it,

the feast of the Jewish Circumcision; and consequently hereafter, when

the universal monarchy of the Jews is actually established, he won't

take the trouble to append a Christian calendar to his own Jewish

calendars, as we now append the Jewish to our Christian. The necessity,

however, of inculcating in our schools a better and more exact

acquaintance with the seasons of the Jewish festivals, and with their

religious observances in general, will not be so fully manifest until

hereafter, when the Jews shall have elevated Germany to the proud

position of being their Land of Promise, leaving us to make our

crusade, and our return to the Asiatic land of promise, if we feel

disposed--to a holy sepulchre, and a sacred Calvary.

And yet _I_ think (to close this digression by another) that hereafter,

when we become the Christian numerators of Jewish denominators, we

should be wrong to set out, as modern crusaders, for the holy land, as

to which the Jews themselves trouble their heads but little. It is

certain that they will treat us with a far wider measure of the spirit

of tolerance than we, unfortunately, have extended to them; but their

genius for commerce, which they have hitherto been so much reproached

with, will be found to prove itself a guardian angel for us poor

Christians, and to take us under its tutelage, inasmuch as we are so

indispensably necessary to them as purchasers and consumers of the

unprepared hindquarters of the cattle (for it is only the fore-quarters

which they may eat, unless the veins are all taken out). Who else but

Christians can take the place of the beasts of burden--as no animal may

be degraded by working on the "Schabbes"[48] (Sabbath)--and perform the

necessary draught and other labour? and to whom are they to entrust the

performance of menial and manual employments, like the ancient

republicans, but to us, their nobler slaves and helots, whom they will,

therefore, be sure to treat with more consideration than they have

heretofore treated us when we have omitted to pay our promissory notes

as they became due.

I return to our poor's advocate, and record that on Michaelmas Day he

could get no money, and consequently no Michaelmas goose. Lenette's

grief at the absence of the goose of her ecclesiastical communion we

must all share. Women, who care less about eating and drinking than the

most ascetic philosophers--caring, indeed, more about the latter

themselves than about the former--are at the same time not to be

controlled if they have to go without certain _chronological_ articles

of diet. Their natural liking for burgherly festivities brings it about

that they would rather go without the appointed hymns and the gospel of

the day than without butter-cakes at Christmas, cheesecakes at Easter,

the goose at Michaelmas; their stomachs require a particular cover for

each festival, like Catholic altars. So that the canonical dish is a

kind of secondary sacrament, which, like the primary one, they take,

not for the palate's sake, but "by reason of the ordinance." Antoninus

and Epictetus could provide Siebenkæs with no efficient substitute for

the goose, with which to console the weeping Lenette, who said,

"We really _are_ Christians, whatever you may say, and belong to

the Lutheran Church; and every Lutheran has a goose on his table

to-day--I'm sure my poor dear father and mother always had. As for you,

_you_ believe in nothing." Whether he believed in anything or not,

however, he slipped off, though it was the afternoon of the Jewish

feast-day, to the Jew, who kept a nice pen of geese, with livers both

fat and lean, serving as a post-stable for country friends of his own

religion. When he went into his place he pulled a duodecimo Hebrew

Bible out of his pocket and put it down on the table, with the words,

"It was a great pleasure to him to meet with a keen, diligent, student

of the law; to such a man it would be a real satisfaction to make a

present of his Bible, without asking a halfpenny for it; as it was, an

unpointed edition (that is to say, one without vowels), he couldn't

read it himself, especially as even if it had _had_ points, he couldn't

have managed it. This napkin-press of mine, here"--he said, producing

it from under his coat-tails "I should be very glad if you would allow

me to leave with you, because I find it a good deal in my way at home;

I don't quite know what to do with it. You see, I have particular

reasons for being anxious to get hold of a goose out of your pen; I

don't mind if it's as thin as a whipping-post. _If you like_, you may

_call_ it giving it to me in charity on a holy day of this sort, for

all I care; it'll make no difference to _me_. If I should ever come and

take away the press again, it'll be an easy matter, and it'll be time

enough, to go into the transaction afresh."

It was thus that, in order to secure his wife the free exercise of her

religious observances, he _brought in_ this goose of controversy, which

_seemed_ to have some polemical bearing, as well as to be connected

with distinctive doctrines of faith; and next day these two Doctor

Martin Lutherists ate up the Schmalkaldian article (and, indeed,

_another_ Schmalkaldian article, a _commercial_ one--cold iron,

namely--has often been employed in defence of the articles of

theology). Thus was the capitol of the Lutheran religion saved, in an

easy manner, by the bird, which was roasted (so to speak) at the fire

of an _auto-da-fé_.

But on this particular morning up came the wigmaker, an individual whom

he was delighted to see generally, though _not_ to-day, for on the day

before, Michaelmas, the quarter's house rent was due, as we may

remember. The _Friseur_ presented himself as a sort of mute bill "at

sight;" yet he was polite enough not to _ask_ for anything. He merely

mentioned, in a casual manner, that "there was going to be an auction

of a variety of things on the Monday before St. Andrew's Day, and in

case the advocate might care to get together a few things for it, he

thought he would give him notice of it, as he held a life appointment

from the Houses of Assembly as auction-crier."

He was scarcely down stairs before Lenette gave deep, but not loud,

expression to her woes, saying he had "dunned them now, and that the

whole house must know all about their disreputable style of

housekeeping: had he not talked about furniture?" It was

incomprehensible how the poor woman could have fancied anybody had been

in the dark about it before! Poor people are always the first to nose

out poverty. At the same time Firmian had been ashamed to tell the

_Friseur_ that he had been obliged to appoint himself auctioneer of his

own furniture. Here he perceived that he blushed for his poverty more

before one person, and before the poor, than he did before a whole

town, and before the rich; and he flew into a furious indignation with

these execrable _eructations_ of human vanity in his noblest parts.

The path from hence to St. Andrew's Day, all bordered with nothing but

thistles as it is, cannot possibly seem longer, even to the reader,

than it did to my hero, who, moreover, had to take hold of the thistles

and pull them up with his own hands. The garden of his life kept

getting more and more like a _jardin Anglais_, where only prickly and

barren trees, but no fruit-trees, were to be found.

Every night, when he opened the latch of his bed-railings, he would

say, with great enjoyment, to his Lenette, "Only twenty (or nineteen,

or eighteen, or seventeen) days now to the shooting-match." But the

hairdresser and auction-crier had played the deuce and all with

Lenette, though the evenings were long and dark and splendidly

convenient for needy borrowers on deposit, veiling and hiding the

naked, abashed, misery of the poor; she was ashamed the people in the

house should know, and afraid to meet them. Firmian, who was astonished

equally at the inexhaustible resources of his brain and of his house,

and who kept saying to himself, "Do you know, I'm really curious to see

what I shall hit upon to-day again, and how I shall manage to get out

of _this_ difficulty now--" Firmian, a day or two after the Michaelmas

dinner, got his eye upon two more good articles of furniture--a long

cask-siphon and a rocking-horse (a relic of his childhood). "We haven't

a cask, and we haven't a baby," he said. But his wife implored him, for

heaven's sake, "not to put her to this shame. The horse and the siphon"

(she said) "are things that would stick out of the basket so terribly,

or out from under one's apron, and in the moonlight everybody would see

them."

And yet _something_ must go! Firmian said, in an odd cutting, yet

sorrowful way, "It must be so! Fate, like Pritzel,[49] is beating on

the bottom of the drum, and the oats are jumping on the top of it; we

have got to eat off the drum."

"Anything," she said, faint and beaten, "except things that stick out

so." She searched about, opened the top drawer of the cupboard, and

took out a faded wreath of artificial flowers: she said, "Rather take

this!" and neither smiled nor wept! _He_ had often looked at it; but as

he had sent it to her himself last New Year's Day, the day of their

betrothal, and because it was so romantically beautiful (a white rose,

two red rosebuds, and a border of forget-me-nots) every fibre of that

tender heart of his would have stood out against parting with this

pretty relic--this memorial of better, happier, days. The patient,

resigned way in which she made the sacrifice of these poor old

flowers tore his heart in two. "Lenette!" he said, moved beyond

expression--"why, you know, these are our betrothal flowers!"

"Well, who's to be any the wiser," she said, quite cheerfully and quite

coolly. "You see they're not so _big_ as other things are."

"Have you forgotten, then quite," he stammered, "what I told you these

flowers meant?"

"Let me see," the said, more coldly still, and proud of the goodness of

her memory, "the forget-me-nots mean that I'm not to forget you, and

that you won't forget me--the buds mean happiness--no, no, the buds

mean happiness that's not quite all come yet--and the white rose--I

don't recollect now _what_ the white rose means----"

"It means pain" (he said, overwhelmed with emotion), "and innocence,

and sorrow, and a poor white face." He clasped her in his arms, as the

tears came to his eyes, and cried, "Oh! poor darling! poor darling!

What can I do? It's all beyond me! I should like to give you everything

the world contains, and I have nothing----"

He ceased suddenly, for while his arms were round her, she had shut up

the drawer of the cupboard, and was looking at him with calm, clear,

gentle eyes, not the trace of a tear in them. She resumed her petition

in the old tone saying, "I may keep the siphon and the horse, mayn't I?

We shall get more money for the flowers." What he said was, "Lenette!

Oh, darling Lenette," over and over again, each time more tenderly.

"But why not?" she asked, more gently each time, for she didn't

understand him in the least. "I had sooner pawn the coat off my back,"

was his answer. But as she now got the alarming idea into her head that

what he was driving at was the calico gown, and as _this_ put her into

a great state, and as she immediately began to inveigh warmly against

all pledging of large articles; and as he clearly perceived that her

previous coldness had been thoroughly genuine, and not assumed, he

knew, alas! the very worst, a grief which no sweet drops of philosophy

could avail to alleviate, namely--she either loved him no longer, or,

she had never really loved him at all.

The sinews of his arms were now fairly cut in two, the sinews of his

arms which had till now kept misfortune at bay. In the prostration of

this his (spiritual) putrid fever he could say nothing but--"Whatever

you please, dear; it's all the same to me now."

Upon that, she went out delighted, and quickly, to old Sabel, but came

back again immediately. This pleased him; sorrow having gnawed deeper

into his heart during the three moments she was gone, he could follow

up the bitter speech with these quiet words: "Put up your marriage

wreath along with the other flowers, there'll be a little more weight,

and a little more money for it; though it is nothing like such pretty

work as my flowers."

"My marriage wreath?" cried Lenette, colouring with anger, while two

bitter tears burst from her eyes. "No, that I positively _shall_ NOT

let go, it shall be put with me into my coffin, as my poor dear

mother's was. Did you not take it up in your hand from the table on my

wedding-day, when I had taken it off to have my hair powdered, and say

you thought quite as much of it as you did of the marriage ceremony

itself, if not more? (I noticed what you said very carefully, and

remember it quite distinctly). No, no, I am your wife, at all events,

and I shall never let that wreath go as long as _I_ live."

His emotion now took a new bent, one more in harmony with hers, but he

masked this behind the question, "What made you come back in such a

hurry?" It was that old Sabel had just been in at the bookbinder's, it

seemed, and Herr von Meyern had been there too. That young gentleman

was in the habit of getting off his horse and dropping in, partly to

see what new books the ladies were having bound at the bookbinder's,

and in what sort of pretty bindings, partly to stick up his leg

with its riding boot upon the cobbler's bench and get him to stitch a

top tighter, asking about all sorts of things during the process.

The world--(which expression can only mean the collection of female

tongue-threshers of empty straw belonging to Kuhschnappel)--may

undoubtedly conclude, if it be so minded, the Venner to be a regular

Henry the Fowler with respect to more women than one in the house, the

latter being a feminine _Volière_ to him; but I want proofs of this.

Lenette, however, didn't trouble herself about any proofs, but piously

fled out of the way of Rosa the birdcatcher.

I further relate (doing so, moreover, without any very marked blush for

the mutability of the human heart) that at this point Firmian's

compressed thoracic cavity grew several inches wider, so as to give

admission to a considerable modicum of happiness, for no other reason

but that Lenette had kept such a tight grasp of her marriage-wreath,

and had endured the Venner for so short a time. "She is faithful, at

all events, although she may be rather cool; in fact, I don't really

believe she _is_ a bit cool, either, after all." So that he was quite

pleased that she should have her way (which was _his_ also) about

keeping the wedding-wreath in the house and in her heart. Besides

which, without contending further about the betrothal-wreath, he let

her have that _other_ way of hers, though less willingly--this being a

proceeding which hurt _his_ feelings only, not hers. His old flower

keepsake was accordingly deposited in the hands of an obliging lady who

rejoiced in the title of "Appraiser," on the solemn understanding that

it was to be redeemed with the very first dollar which should drop from

the bird-pole on St. Andrew's Day.

The blood-money of these silken flowers was so parcelled out as to be

made available by way of stepping-stones in the muddy path leading to

the Sunday before the shooting-match. This Sunday (the 27th November,

1785) was to be followed by the Monday for which the auction had been

announced; on the Wednesday he (and I hope all of us with him) would be

in his place in front of the bird-pole.

It is true, however, that on the Sunday he had to ford a stream swollen

to a considerable extent by rainy weather; we will go through it after

him, but I give due notice that, in the middle, it is pretty deep.

The stomach of his inner man evinced a wonderful disrelish, and

exhibited a reversed peristaltic motion towards everything in the shape

of pawning, since the affair of the flowers. The reason was--there was

nothing more to which he could _refer_ his wife. At first, he used to

refer her to the shooting-match; but when the mortar and the chair had

evacuated the fortress without tuck of drum, they not being articles of

a sort to be obtained as prizes for shooting, he took to referring her

to public auctions at which he could always buy what he might require

at about half price. Finally, though still referring her to auctions,

he did so no longer with a view to import, but to export, trade--as a

seller, rather than as a buyer, of commodities; in which respect he

surpasses Spain.

He who has risen victorious over great and serious attacks of an

insulting or offensive nature, has often had to yield to very small and

trifling ones; and so it is with our troubles. The stout, firm heart,

which has beat strongly on all through long years of bitter trial and

affliction, will often break at once, like over-flooded ice, at some

lightest touch of Fortune's foot. Till now, Siebenkæs had carried

himself erect, and borne his burden without a bend, ay, and with a

merrier heart than many a man. Up to this hour, he really hadn't minded

the whole affair one single button. Had he not (merely to mention one

or two instances) pointed out that, in the matter of clothes, he was

better off than the Emperor of Germany, who (he said) had nothing to

put on, on his coronation-day in Frankfort, but a frightful old

cast-off robe of Charles the Great's, not much better than Rabelais's

old gown, though _that_ was not by several centuries so old as the

Imperial one? And once when his wife was sadly looking over his fading

perennial clothes flora, he told her all she had to do was to suppose

he was serving in the new world with a thousand or so of other Anspach

men, and the ship which was bringing out their new uniforms had been

captured by the enemy, so that the whole force had nothing to put on

but what they would have preferred to have been able to take off.

Likewise that what he had had to go upon, and to take his stand upon

for a considerable time past, had been something much superior to his

own pair of boots (by this he clearly meant pure apathy); as for his

boots, they, having been twice new fronted, had been shoved in like

pocket telescopes, or trombones, till they had become a pair of fair

halt-boots; just as the German _corpora_, also, by the influence of

long years of civilisation and culture, have got considerably taken in,

the long rifle having been docked into a short, or non-commissioned

officers' rifle.

But on the Sunday to which I am alluding, he was far too much scared at

the sight of one single bird of prey and of ill omen, flying athwart

the lonely Sahara desert in which his life was passing. He himself was

taken by surprise at this alarm of his; he would have expected anything

else but alarm under the circumstances. For as it had hitherto been his

custom to prepare himself for dark and tragic scenes by comedy

rehearsals of them--by which I mean, that he carefully read up,

beforehand, all the legal steps which Herr von Blaise could take

against him, thus taking up, in sport, and in advance, the burdens

which the future had in store--it astonished him greatly to find that

an ill, quite certain to come, and clearly foreseen, should prove to

have longer thorns, when it came up towards him out of the future, than

it seemed to possess while still at a distance.

So that when, on the Sunday, the messenger of the Inheritance Office

came, with the long-expected THIRD dilatory plea of the Heimlicher, and

with the third affirmatory decree written on the face thereof, as his

breast was in the condition of a vacuum (no air to breathe in it)

before his coming, his poor heart grew sick and breathless indeed, when

this fresh stroke of the air-pump exhausted the receiver even more

thoroughly than it had been emptied before.

Amid the multiplicity of matters which it has been my duty to report to

the public, I have omitted, on purpose, all mention of the second of

Mr. Blaise's dilatory pleas, because I thought I might assume that

every reader who has had as much as half a ship's pound weight of

legal documents through his hands--or one single settlement of law

accounts--would take it for granted, as a matter of course, that the

first petition for delay would infallibly be followed by a second. It

reflects much discredit on our administration of justice that every

upright, honourable counsel finds himself compelled to adduce such a

number of reasons (I wish I might say "lies") before he can be accorded

the smallest, necessary term of delay; he has got to say his children

and his wife are dying; that he has met with all kinds of unfortunate

accidents, and has thousands of things to do, journeys to make, and

sicknesses. Whereas it ought to be quite enough for him to say that the

preparation of the innumerable petitions for delay with which he is

overwhelmed, leaves him little time to write anything else. People

ought to notice that these petitions for delay tend, as all other

petitions do, to the protracting of the suit, just as all the wheels of

a watch work together to retard the principal wheel. A slow pulse is a

sign of longevity not only in human beings but in lawsuits. It seems to

me that an advocate who has any conscience is glad to do what he

can to promote the length of life in his opponent's suit--not in

his own client's, he would make an end of _that_ in a minute if he

could--partly to punish the said opponent, partly to terrify him, or

else to snatch, from his grasp a favourable judgment (a sort of thing

as to which nobody can form an idea whether it is likely or not)--for

as many years as possible; just as in 'Gulliver's Travels,' the people

who had a black mark on their brow were doomed to the torture of

eternal life. The object of the man of business on the opposite side is

a similar prolongation of the war to _his_ opponents, and thus the two

counsel immesh the two clients in a long drag-net of documents, &c.,

each with the best possible intentions. On the whole, lawyers are not

so indifferent to the question, "What is the law?" as to the question,

"What is justice?" For which reason they prefer arguing to writing; as

_Simonides_, when he was asked by the king the question, "What is God?"

begged for a day to consider his answer--then for another day--then for

another--and for another, and always for another, because no man's life

is sufficient to answer that question--so the jurist, when he is

asked, "What is justice?" keeps continually asking for more and more

delays--he can never reply to the question--indeed, if the judges and

clients would let him, he would gladly devote his whole life to writing

replies to a legal question of this sort. Advocates are so used to this

way of looking at matters, that it never strikes them that there is

anything unusual about it.

I return to my story. This blow of the iron secular arm, with its six

long thief- and writing-fingers, all but felled Siebenkæs to the earth.

The vapours about his path in life condensed to morning mist, the

morning mist to evening clouds, the clouds to showers of rain. "Many a

poor devil has more to do than he can manage," he said. If he had had a

pleasant, cheerful wife, he would not have said this; but one such as

his, who painfully _trailed_ her cross (instead of taking it up), and

was all lamentations--an elegiac poetess, a Job's comforter--was

herself a _second_ cross to bear.

He set to work and thought the whole thing over; he had hardly enough

left to buy the next year's almanack, or a bundle of Hamburgh quills

(for his satires used up Lenette's feather dusters much more than his

own energies, so that he often thought of cutting Stiefel's red

pipe-stalk into a pen); he would have been delighted to convert his

plates into something to eat (there were none left, however), following

the example of the Gauls, who used round pieces of bread as plates

first, and afterwards as dessert; or of the Huns, who, after riding

upon pieces of beef (by way of saddles) till it was partly cooked,

dined upon these saddles. His half-boots would need to be new fronted,

and abbreviated for the third time, before the arrival of the impending

shooting-match day; and of the necessary requisites for the performance

of that operation the only one in existence was the artist, Fecht the

cobbler. In short, for that important occasion he had nothing to put on

his back or in his pocket, his bullet-pouch, or his powder-horn.

When a man intentionally works his anxieties and apprehensions up to

the highest possible pitch, some consolation is sure to fall upon his

heart from heaven, like a drop of warm rain. Siebenkæs began

catechising himself more strictly, asking himself what it really was

that he was tormenting himself about. Nothing but the fear of having to

go to the shooting-match without money, without powder and shot, and

without having had his boots abbreviated for the third time! "Is that

really all?" he said. "And what, if you please, is there to make it a

compulsory matter that I should go there at all? I'll tell you what it

is" (he went on to himself), "I am the monkey complaining bitterly

that, having stuck his hand into a narrow-mouthed bottle of rice, and

filled it, he can't pull it out without a corkscrew. All I've got to do

is to sell my rifle and my shooting ticket; all I've got to do is to

open my hand and draw it out empty." So he made up his mind to take his

rifle to the barber on the day of the auction to be put up to sale.

All battered, bruised, and weary with the day, he climbed into his bed,

with the thought of which safe and sheltered anchoring ground he

consoled himself all day long. "There is this blessed property about

night," he said, as he sat and spread the feathers of his quilt level,

"that while it lasts we need trouble ourselves neither about candles,

coals, victuals, drink, debts, nor clothes; all we want is a bed. A

poor fellow is in peace and comfort as long as he is lying down: and,

luckily, he has only got to stand for half of his time."

The attacks of syncope, to which our souls and our cheerfulness are

subject, cease, as those of the body do (according to Zimmermann), when

the patient is placed in a horizontal position.

Had his bed been provided with bed-tassel, I should have called it the

capstan, whereby he heaved himself slowly up on the Monday morning from

his resting place. When he got up, he ascended to the garret, where his

rifle was nailed up in an old, long field-chest, to keep it safe. This

rifle was a valuable legacy from his father, who had been huntsman and

gun-loader to a great prince of the empire. He took a crowbar, and,

using it as a lever, prised up the lid with its roots, _i. e_. nails;

and the first thing he saw in it was a leather arm, which "gave him

quite a turn;" for he had had many a good thrashing from that arm in

bygone days.

It will not take me too far out of my way to expend a word or two on

this subject. This full-dress arm had been borne by Siebenkæs's father

on his body (as it might be in the field of his escutcheon) ever since

the time when he had lost his natural arm in the military service of

the before-mentioned prince, who, as some slight reward, had got him

his appointment as gun-loader to his corps of Jägers. The gun-loader

wore this auxiliary arm fastened to a hook on his left shoulder; it

being more like the arm of a Hussar's pelisse, or an elongated glove,

worn by way of ornament, than as a _mouth_ Christian of an arm

(pretending to be what it was not). In the education of his children,

however, the leather arm served, to some extent, the purpose of a

school library and Bible Society, and was the _collaborateur_ of the

fleshly arm. Every-day shortcomings--for instance, when Firmian made a

mistake in his multiplication, or rode on the pointer dog, or ate

gunpowder, or broke a pipe--were punished _not_ severely, that is, only

with a stick, which in all good schools runs up the backs of the

children by way of capillary sap-vessel or siphon, to supply the

nourishing juice of knowledge; or is the carriage-pole to which entire

winter-schools are harnessed, and at which they tug with a will. But

there were two other sorts of transgressions which he punished _more_

severely. When one of the children laughed at table during meals, or

hesitated, or made a blunder during the long table-grace or evening

prayers, he would immediately amputate his adventitious arm with his

natural one, and administer a tremendous thrashing to the little

darling.

Firmian remembered, as if it had happened yesterday, one occasion when

he and his sisters had been thrashed, turn about, for a whole half-hour

at dinner-time with the battle-flail, because one of them began to

laugh while the long muscle was swishing about the ears of another, who

was serious enough. The sight of the bit of leather made his heart burn

even at this day. I can quite see the advantage to parents and teachers

who try the expedient of unhooking an empty by an organic arm, and

smiting a pupil with this species of Concordat, and alliance between

the _temporal_ and _spiritual arms_; but this mode of punishment ought

to be _invariably_ the one made use of; for there is nothing which

infuriates children more than anything _new_ in the way of instruments

of punishment, or a new mode of application of those in general use. A

child who is accustomed to rulers and blows on the back, must not be

set upon with boxes on the ear and bare hands; nor one accustomed to

the latter treated to the former. The author of these Flower-pieces had

once a slipper thrown at him in his earlier days. The scar of that

slipper is still fresh in his heart, whereas he has scarcely any

recollection of lickings of the ordinary sort.

Siebenkæs pulled the arm of punishment and the rifle out of the chest;

but what a treasure trove there was beneath them! Here was help,

indeed! At all events he could go to the shooting-match in shorter

boots, and eat whatever he liked for some days to come. What most

astonishes both him and me in this affair (it is easily explicable,

however) is that he had never thought of it sooner, inasmuch as his

father was a Jäger; while, on the other hand, I must confess it could

not have happened on a luckier day, because it chanced to be just the

day of the auction.

The hunting spear, the horse's tail, the decoy bird, the fox-trap, the

_couteau de chasse_, the medicine-chest, the fencing mask and foil--a

collection of things which he had never had a thought of looking for in

the chest--could be taken over instantly to the town-house, and set up

to auction on the spot by the hairdressing Saxon.

It was done accordingly. After all his troubles, the little piece of

good luck warmed and gladdened his heart. He went himself after the

box--which was sent just as it stood to the auction, except that the

rifle and the leathern artery were kept back--to hear what would be

offered for the things.

He took up his position (on account of the excessive length of his

half-boots) at the back of the auctioneer's table, close to his hectic

landlord. The sight of this pile of heterogeneous goods and chattels

all heaped up higgledy-piggledy (as if some grand conflagration were

raging, and it had been collected in haste for safety; or as if it were

the plunder of some captured city), goods and chattels sold, for the

most part, by people on the downward path to poverty, and bought by

those who had arrived at poverty already--had the effect of making him

contemn and despise more every moment all this complex pumping

apparatus, this machinery for keeping the spring-wells of a few petty,

feeble lives in clear and vigorous flow; and he himself, the engineer

and driver of this machinery, felt his sense of manliness grow

stronger. He was furious with himself, because his soul had seemed

yesterday to be but a sham jewel, which a drop of aquafortis deprives

of its colour and lustre, whereas a real jewel never loses either.

Nothing awakens our humour more, nor renders us more utterly

indifferent to the honour paid to mere rank and worldly position,

than our being in any manner compelled to fall back upon the honour

due to ourselves (independently of our chance position), our own

_intrinsic worth_, our being compelled to tar over our inner being with

philosophy (as if it were a Diogenes' tub), by way of protection

against injuries from without; or (in a prettier metaphor) when, like

pearl oysters, we have to exude pearls of maxims to fill the holes

which worms bore in our mother-of-pearl. Now pearls are better than

uninjured mother-of-pearl; an idea which I should like to have written

in letters of gold.

I have good reasons of my own for prefacing what has to follow with all

this philosophy, because I want to get the reader into such a frame of

mind that he may not make too great a fuss about what the advocate is

going to do now: it was really nothing but a harmless piece of fun. As

the be-powdered lungs of the auctioneer were more adapted to wheezing

and coughing than to shouting, he took the auction-hammer from this

hammer-man and sold off the things himself. True, he only did it for

about half an hour, and only auctioned his own things; and even

then he would have thought twice about taking the hammer in hand and

setting to work, if it hadn't been such an indescribable delight

to him to hold up the horse's tail, the spear, the decoy-bird, &c., and

hammer on the table and cry, "Four groschen for the horse's tail,

_once_! five kreuzer for the decoy, _twice_!--going! Half-a dollar

for the fox-trap, once! two gulden for this fine foil, twice! two

gulden--going--going--and gone!" He did what it is an auctioneer's duty

to do, he praised the goods. He turned the horse's tail over and over,

and opened it out before the huntsmen who were at the sale (the

shooting-match had attracted many from a distance, as carrion does

vultures), stroked it with and against the hair, and said there was

enough of it to make snares for all the blackbirds in the Black Forest.

He held up the decoy-bird in its best light, exhibiting to the company

its wooden beak, its wings, talons, and feathers, and only wished there

were a hawk present, that he might bait the decoy and lure it.

The entries in his housekeeping account-book, which, on account of the

wretchedness of my memory, I have had to refer to twice, show that the

sum received from the huntsmen amounted to seven florins and some

groschen. This does not include the medicine-chest nor the long-necked

mask; for nobody would have anything to say to _them_. When he went

home he poured the whole of this crown-treasure and sinking-fund into

Lenette's gold satchel, taking occasion to warn her and himself of the

dangers of great riches, and holding up to both the example of those

who are arrogant by reason of wealth, and must therefore of necessity,

sooner or later, come to ruin.

In my Seventh Chapter, which I shall commence immediately, I shall

at length be able, after all these thousands of domestic worries

and miseries, to conduct the learned world of Germany to the

shooting-ground and present to them my hero as a worthy member

of the shooting-club, with a rifle and bullets, and properly and

respectably--well, _booted_, more than _attired_ for his bullets are

cast, his rifle cleaned, and his boots have put on their shoes,

Fecht having stitched, on his knee, the three-quarter boots down to

half-boots, and soled them with the--leather arm, of which enough has

been said already.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SHOOTING-MATCH--ROSA'S AUTUMNAL CAMPAIGN--CONSIDERATIONS

CONCERNING CURSES, KISSES, AND THE MILITIA.

There is nothing which so much inconveniences me, or is so much to the

prejudice of this story (so beautiful in itself), as the fact that I

have made a resolution to restrict it within the compass of four

alphabets. I have thus, by my own act, deprived myself of everything in

the shape of room for digressions. I find myself, metaphorically, in a

somewhat similar position to one which I once found myself in, without

metaphor, on an occasion when I was measuring the diameter and

circumference of the town of Hof. On that occasion I had fastened a

Catel's pedometer by a hook to the waistband of my trousers and the

silken cord which runs down the thigh to a curved hook of steel at my

knee, so that the three indexes on one dial (of which the first marks a

hundred steps, the second a thousand, and the third up to twenty

thousand) were all moving just as I moved myself. At this moment I met

a young lady, whom it was incumbent on me that I should see home. I

begged her to excuse me, as I had a Catel's pedometer on, and had

already made a certain number of steps towards my measurement of the

diameter of Hof. "You see, in a moment," I said, "how I am situated.

The pedometer, like a species of conscience, records all the steps I

take; and, with a lady, I shall be obliged to take shorter steps,

besides thousands of sideway and backward steps, all of which the

pedometer will put to the account of the diameter. So, you see, I am

afraid it's quite impossible that I _can_ have the pleasure of----"

However, this only made her the more determined that I _should_, and I

was well laughed at; but I screwed myself to the spot, and wouldn't

stir. At last I said I would go home with her, pedometer and all, if

she would just read off my indexes for me (seeing I couldn't twist

myself down low enough to see the dial)--read them off for me

twice--firstly, then and there, and secondly, when we got to her

house--so that I might deduct the steps taken by me in this young

lady's company from the size of Hof. This agreement was honestly kept;

and this little account of the occurrence may be of service to me some

day if ever I publish (as I have not given up all hopes of doing) my

perspective sketch of the town of Hof; and townspeople who saw me

walking with the said young lady, and with the pedometer trailing at my

knee, might cast it in my teeth and say it was a lame affair, and that

nobody could calculate as to the steps he might take in a lady's

company, far less apply them to the measurement of a town.

St. Andrew's Day was bright and fine, and not very windy. It was

tolerably warm, and there wasn't as much snow in the furrows as would

have cooled a nutshell of wine, or knocked over a humming-bird. On the

previous Tuesday Siebenkæs had been looking on with the other

spectators, when the bird-pole had described its majestic arc in

descending to impale the black golden eagle with outstretched wings,

and rise again therewith on high. He felt some emotion as the thought

struck him, "That bird of prey up there holds in his claws, and will

dispense, the happiness or the misery of thy Lenette's coming weeks,

and our goddess of Fortune has transformed herself and dwindled into

that black form, nothing left of her but her WINGS and BALL."

On St. Andrew's morning, as he said good-bye to Lenette, with kisses,

and in his abbreviated boots, over which he had a pair of goloshes, she

said, "May God grant you luck, and not let you do any mischief with

your rifle." She asked several times if there was nothing he had

forgotten--his eyeglass, or his handkerchief, or his purse; "And mind

you don't get into any quarrel with Mr. von Meyern," was her parting

counsel: and finally, as one or two preliminary thundrous drum-ruffles

were heard from the direction of the courthouse, she added most

anxiously, "For God's sake, mind and don't shoot yourself; my blood

will run cold the whole forenoon every time I hear a gun go off!"

At length the long thread of riflemen, rolled up like a ball, began to

unwind itself, and the waving line, like a great serpent, moved off in

surging convolutions to the sound of trumpets and drums. A banner

represented the serpent's crest, and the standard-bearer's coat was

like a second flag beneath the other. The town-soldiery, more

remarkable for quality than for quantity, shot the mottled line of

competitors at intervals with the white of their uniforms. The

auctioneering hairdresser--the only member of the lower ten thousand

who rejoiced in a powdered head--tripped along, keeping the white peak

of his cap at the due degree of distance from the leather pigtails of

the aristocracy, which he had that morning tied and powdered. The

multitude felt what a lofty position in this world really was, when,

with bent heads, they raised their eyes to Heimlicher von Blaise, the

director of the competition, who accompanied the procession in his

capacity of aorta of the whole arterial system, or elementary fire of

all these ignes-fatui--or, in a word, as master of the shooters' lodge.

Happy was the wife who peeped out and saw her husband marching past in

the procession--happy was Lenette, for her husband was there, and

looked gallantly up as he passed by. His short boots looked very nice,

indeed; they were made both in the old fashion and in the new, and,

like man, had put on the new (short) Adam over the old one.

I wish Schulrath Stiefel had given a thought or so to the St. Andrew's

shooting-match, and looked out of his window at his Orestes; however,

he went on with his reviewing.

Now, when these processional caterpillars had crept together again at

the shooting-ground, as upon a leaf--when the eagle hung in his

heavenly eyrie, like the crest of the future's armorial bearings--when

the wind instruments, which the troop of "wandering minstrels" had

scarce been able to hold firmly to their lips, blared out their loudest

now that the band was halted, and as the procession, with martial tramp

and rattle of grounded rifles, came with a rush into the empty echoing

shooting-house, everybody, strictly speaking, was more or less out of

his senses, and mentally intoxicated; and that although the lots were

not even drawn, far less any shot fired. Siebenkæs said to himself,

"The whole thing is stuff and nonsense, yet see how it has gone to all

our heads, and how a mere _unbroken_ faded flower-wreath of pleasant

_trifles_, wound ten times about our hearts, half chokes and darkens

them. Our thirsty heart is made of loose, absorptive mould; a warm

shower makes it swell, and as it expands it cracks the roots of all the

plants that are growing in it."

Mr. von Blaise, who smiled unceasingly upon my hero, and treated the

others with the rudeness becoming authority, ordered the lots to be

drawn which were to decide the order in which the competitors were to

shoot. The reader cannot expect Chance to stop the wheel of Fortune,

thrust in her hand, and, behind her bandage, pull out from among

seventy numbers the very first for the advocate; she drew him the

twelfth, however. And at length the brave Germans and imperial citizens

opened fire upon the Roman eagle. At first they aimed at his crown. The

eagerness and zeal of these pretenders were proportioned to the

importance of the affair: was there not a royal revenue of six florins

attached to this golden penthouse when the bullet brought it down--to

say nothing whatever of other crown property, consisting of three

pounds of tow and a pewter shaving-dish. The fellows did what they

could; but the rifle placed the crown of the eagle, not, alas! on our

hero's head, but upon that of No. 11, his predecessor, the hectic

Saxon. He had need of it, poor fellow! seeing that, like a Prince of

Wales, he had come into possession of the crown debts sooner than of

the crown itself.

At a shooting contest of this kind nothing is better calculated to

dissipate everything in the shape of tedium than to have arrangements

made for "running shooting" (as it is called) being carried on by those

who are waiting their turn at the birdpole. A man who has to wait while

sixty-nine other people slowly aim and shoot before his turn comes

round, may find a good deal to amuse him if, during that time, he can

load and aim at something of a less lofty kind--for instance, a

Capuchin general. The "running" or "swing" shooting, as carried out at

Kuhschnappel, differs in no respect from that of other places. A piece

of canvas is hung up, and floats to and fro; there are painted dishes

of edibles upon it, as on a table-cloth, and whoever puts a bullet

through one of these paintings obtains the original--just as princes

choose their brides from their portraits, before bringing home the

brides in person; or as witches stick pins into a man's image in order

to wound the prototype himself. The Kuhschnappelers were, on this

occasion, shooting at a portrait on this canvas, which a great many

persons considered to represent a Capuchin general. I know that there

were some who, basing their opinion chiefly upon the red hat in the

portrait, considered it to represent a cardinal, or cardinal-protector,

but these have clearly, in the first place, got to settle the point

with a third party, which differed from both of those above mentioned,

holding that it portrayed the whore of Babylon--that is to say, a

European one. From all of which we may form a pretty accurate estimate

of the amount of truth contained in another rumour--which I

contradicted in the first hour of its existence--namely, that the

Augsburg people had taken offence at this effigy-arquebusading, and had

written, in consequence, to the attorney-general representing that they

felt themselves aggrieved, and that it was an injustice to one religion

if, within the bounds of the holy Roman empire, a general of a

religious order should be shot to shivers, without a Lutheran

superintendent general being also shot to shivers at the same time. I

should certainly have heard something further about this, if it had

been anything but mere wind. Indeed, I have a shrewd suspicion that the

whole story is no more than a false tradition, or garbled version of

_another_ story, which a gentleman of rank belonging to Vienna recently

_lied_ to me at table. What he said was, that in the more considerable

towns of the empire, where the spirit-level of religious toleration has

established a beautiful equilibrium between Papists and Lutherans, many

had complained, on the part of the Lutherans, of the circumstance that

although there were equal numbers of night-watchmen and censors (that

is, transcendental night-watchmen), keepers of hotels, and keepers of

circulating libraries of each communion, yet there were more Papists

hanged than Lutherans; so that it was very clear, whether the Jesuits

had to do with it or not, that a high and important post such as the

gallows was not filled with the same amount of impartiality as the

Council of State, but with a certain bias towards the Catholics. I

thought of contradicting the story, in the most distinct terms, in the

'Literary Gazette' of December last, but Government declined to pay the

expense of the insertion.

However, although those who occupied themselves with the "swing"

shooting _did_ only have a Capuchin to aim at, the said swing shooting

was every bit as important a business as the shooting at the _standing_

mark. I must point out (in this connection) that there were edible

prizes attached to the divers bodily members of this said general of

his order, which had their attractions for riflemen of a reflective

turn of mind. An entire Bohemian porker was the prize appointed for him

who should pierce the heart of the Capuchin pasha--which heart,

however, was represented by a spot no bigger than a beauty-patch--so

that he who should hit this little mark would have need of all his

skill and nerve. The cardinal's hat was easier of attainment, for which

reason it was worth only a couple of jack. The honorarium of the

oculist who should succeed in inserting new (_leaden_) pupils into the

cardinal's eyes consisted of an equivalent number of geese. As he was

portrayed in the full fervour of prayer, it was well worth anyone's

while to send a bullet through between his hands, seeing that this

would be tantamount to knocking the two fore-quarters out of a

cantering, smoked pig. And each of the cardinal's feet rested upon a

fine hind-quarter or ham. I do not hesitate for a moment--whatever the

imperial burgh of Kuhschnappel may say to it--to record, with the

utmost distinctness, that no portion of the whole lord-protector was

more poorly endowed, or had a scantier revenue and salarium allotted to

it, than his navel; for there was nothing to be got out of that, with

however good a bullet, but a Bologna sausage.

The advocate had failed in his designs upon the crown; but fortune

chucked him the cardinal's hat to make up for it--the cardinal's hat

with two pike inside it. But some puissant necromantic spell of

invulnerability turned all his bullets aside from the eagle's head, and

from the general's too. He would fain have sent one eye, at any rate,

out of the face of the harlot of Babylon, but he could not manage that

either.

Now the prize-lists--which are correct, seeing that they were made

out by the secretary, under the eyes of the president, Herr von

Blaise--state with distinctness that the head, the ring in the beak,

and the little flag, fell into the hands of numbers 16, 2, and 63.

The sceptre was now being aimed at; and Siebenkæs would have been very

very glad, for his dear little wife's sake (waiting for him now, as she

was, with the soup), to have sent that, at least, flying out of the

eagle's talons, and to have fixed it, by way of a bayonet, on to his

rifle.

All the numbers who had tried their best to break off this golden

oak-branch had shot in vain, except the worst--the most to be dreaded

of all--his own predecessor and landlord. _He_ aimed, and shot--and the

gilded harpoon quivered. Siebenkæs fired--and the eel-spear came

tumbling down.

Messrs. Meyern and Blaise smiled, and uttered congratulations; the

blowers of instruments, crooked and straight, blew, in honour of the

advent of this new bird-member, a blast both loud and shrill (like the

Karlsbad people, when a new bath-guest arrives), looking closely and

carefully at their music as they did so, though they had played their

little _fanfares_ far oftener than the very night-watchmen. All the

infantas--I mean all the children--began a race for the sceptre, but

the buffoon dashed among them, and scattered them; and, taking up the

sceptre, presented that emblem of sovereignty to the advocate with one

hand, holding in the other his _own_ emblem of sovereignty, the whip.

Siebenkæs contemplated with a smile the little twig of timber--the

little branch, sticking to which the buzzing swarms of nations are so

often borne away; and he veiled his satisfaction under cover of the

following satirical remarks (which the reigning Heimlicher overheard,

and applied to himself):--

"A very pretty little frog-shooter! It _ought_, by rights, to be a

honey-gauge; but the poor bees are crushed by it, that their honey-bags

may be got out of them! The Waiwodes and the despots, child-like, put

the bees of the country to death, and take the honey from their

_stomachs_, not from, their _combs_. A truly preposterous and absurd

implement! It is made of wood; very likely a piece broken off a

shepherd's crook, and gilded, pointed, and notched--one of those

shepherd's staves with which the shepherds often drag the sheep's fat

out of them while they are feeding in the meadows!"

He had ceased to be conscious, now, when he emitted the bitterest

satirical matter (there was never a drop of it in his heart); he often

turned mere acquaintances into foes with some joke, made merely for the

sake of jesting; and couldn't imagine what made people vexed with him,

and why it was that _he_ couldn't have his little bit of fun with them

as well as any one else.

He put the sceptre into the breast of his coat and took it home, seeing

that they would not shoot up to his number again before dinner-time. He

held it up straight and stiff, as the king of diamonds holds his, and

said to Lenette, "There's a soup-ladle and sugar-tongs for you, all in

one!" the allusion being to the two pewter prizes, which, in company

with a sum of nine florins, had fallen to his share by way of

sceptre-fief. It was enough for one shot. And next he gave an account

of the catching of the pike. He expected that Lenette would, at the

very least, go through the five dancing positions and execute Euler's

"knight's move" on the chess-board of the room-floor, into the bargain,

within the first five seconds after hearing the news. She did what she

_could_ do, namely, nothing at all; and said what she knew, namely,

that the landlady had been holding forth, with bitter severity, to the

bookseller's wife, on the subject of the non-payment of the rent, and

further, concerning her own husband, whom she characterised as a

smooth-tongued flatterer and payer of compliments--a man who didn't

half threaten people. "What I tell you," repeated the sceptre-bearer,

"is, that I have this day had the luck to shoot a couple of pikes and a

sceptre, Wendeline Engelkraut!" and he banged his sceptre-knout in

indignation upon the table where the crockery was all set out. She

answered at last, "Well, Lucas came running a short time ago and told

me all about _that_; I _am so_ glad about it, but I should quite think

you will shoot a good many more things yet--will you not? I said so to

the bookseller's wife."

She was slipping into her old cart-rut again, you see, but Firmian

thought, "She can cry and mourn loud enough, but deuce a bit of

gladness can she show when a fellow comes home with a pike or two under

his arm, and a sceptre or so." It was just the same with the wife of

the gentle-hearted Racine, when he threw down a long purse of golden

Louis XVI. he had got hold of, on the table.

How, or whence, oh! beloved wives, cometh to you the naughty trick ye

have of making a kind of parade of an insupportable frigidity and

indifference, just on the very occasions when your husbands come to you

laden with good news, or with presents--that at the very moment when

Fate brightens the wine of your joy into "bloom," your vats grow turbid

with the lees of the _old_ liquor? Comes it from your custom of showing

only one of your faces at a time, like your sister and prototype, the

moon? or from a peevish discontent with destiny? or is its cause a

sweet, delicious, overflowing happiness and gladness, making the heart

too full and the tongue too hard to move?

I believe it is often from all these causes combined.

In men, again--sometimes, too, in women, but only in one out of a

thousand--it may arise from the sad thought of the sharks which tear

off the arm with which, down in the dark ocean, all breathless and

anxious, we have clasped hold of four pearls of happiness. Or, perhaps,

from a deeper question still. Is not our heart's inward bliss but an

olive-leaf which a dove brings to us, fluttering over the great deluge

foaming and seething all round us--an olive-leaf which she has culled

for us away in the far distant Paradise, high up above the flood, clear

and blissful in the eternal sun? And if all we attain of that whole

olive-garden is but one leaf, instead of all its flowers and its fruit,

is this leaf of peace, is this dove of peace, to give to us something

_beyond_ peace--namely, hope?

Firmian went back to the shooting-ground, his breast full of

growing hopes. The heart of man, which, in matters of chance,

makes its calculations in direct defiance of the theory of

probabilities, and when heads have turned up once, expects them three

times running--(although what _ought_ to be anticipated is the very

reverse)--or reckons upon hitting the eagle's talon became it has

knocked the sceptre out of it--this heart of man, uncontrollable alike

in its fears and in its hopes, the advocate took with him to the

shooters' trench.

He came not by the talons, however. And at the folded praying claws or

hands of the general of the Capuchins--these algebraic exponents or

heraldic devices of two forequarters of pork--aimed he alike in vain.

It mattered not; more was left of the eagle, when all was done, than

would be this day of Poland, if the latter, or its coat of arms--a

silver eagle in a bloody field--were to be set up on a throne or a

bird-pole, and shot at by a shooting-club composed of an army or two.

Even the imperial globe was not yet knocked down. Number 69, a

formidable foregoer, Mr. Everard Rosa von Meyern, had taken his

aim--eager to cull _this_ forbidden fruit--a Ribstone pippin and

football fit for a very prince, such as this imperial apple, was a

thing of too great price to be grasped for the sake of what was to be

gained along with it--'twas honour alone that fired his heart--he

pulled his trigger, and he might just as well have aimed in the

opposite direction. Rosa--this particular apple being too high out of

his reach--went, all blushes, in among the lady spectators, dealing out

apples of Paris all round, and telling each lady how lovely she was,

that she might be convinced how handsome he was himself. In the eyes of

a woman, her panegyrist is, firstly, a very _clever_ man, and, ere

long, such a _nice_-LOOKING one. Rosa knew that grains of incense are

the anise which these doves fly after, as though infatuated.

Our friend had no need to disquiet himself about any of the would-be

fruit-gatherers--about the second, eighth, or ninth, till it came to

the eleventh--and he was the Saxon, who shot like the demon in person.

There were few among the seventy who didn't wish this accursed

gallows-number at the deuce, or at all events into the vegetable

kingdom, where it is altogether absent.[50] The hairdresser fired,

struck the eagle on the leg, and the leg remained hanging aloft, with

the imperial globe in the talons.

His lodger (and lawyer) came up to the scratch, but the landlord stood

still in the trench, to satisfy his soul with curses of his luckless

star. As the former levelled the sights of his rifle upon the ball

above, he made up his mind that he would not aim at the ball at all,

but at the eagle's tail, so as simply to _shake_ the apple down.

In one second the worm-eaten world-apple fell. The Saxon cursed beyond

all description.

Siebenkæs all but offered up an inward prayer, not because a pewter

mustard-pot, a sugar-dish, and five florins came showering along with

the apple into his lap, but for the piece of good luck--for the warm

burst of sunshine which thus came breaking out from among the clouds of

the distant storm. "Thou wouldst prove this soul of mine, happy

Fortune," thought he, "and thou placest it, as men do watches, in all

positions--perpendicular and horizontal, quiet and unquiet--to see if

it will go and mark the time correctly in all, or no. Ay, truly! it

_shall_!"

He let this little, bright, miniature earth-ball roll from one hand to

the other, spinning and weaving, as he did so, the following brief

chain of syllogisms:--"What a genealogical tree of copies! Nothing but

pictures within pictures comedies within comedies! The emperor's globe

is an emblem of this terrestrial globe of ours--the core of each is a

handful of earth--and this emperor's globe of mine, again, is a

miniature emblem of a real emperor's, with even less of earth--none at

all, in fact. The mustard-pot and sugar-dish, again, are emblems of

this emblem. What a long, diminishing series, ere man arrives at

enjoyment!" Most of man's pleasures are but _preparations_ for

pleasure; he thinks he has attained his _ends_, when he has merely got

hold of his _means_ to those ends. The burning sun of bliss is beheld

of our feeble eyes but in the seventy mirrors of our seventy years.

Each of these mirrors reflects that sun's image less brightly--more

faint and pale--upon the next; and in the seventieth it shimmers upon

us all frozen, and is become a moon.

He ran home, but without his globe, for he did not mean to tell her of

that till the evening. It was a great refreshment to him to slip,

during his shooting vacations, away from the public turmoil to his

quiet little chamber, give a rapid narrative of anything of importance

going on, and then cast himself back into the _mêlée_. As his number

was a next-door neighbour to Rosa's, and they had, consequently, their

holidays at the same time, it surprises me that he did not come upon

Herr von Meyern beneath his own window, inasmuch as that gentleman was

walking up and down there, with his head elevated, like an ant. He who

desires to destroy a young gentleman of this species, let him look for

him _under_ (if not _in_) a lady's window; just as an experienced

gardener, when he wants to kill woodlice or earwigs, needs only lift up

his flower-pots to annihilate them by the score.

Siebenkæs did not hit so much as another shaving the whole of the

afternoon; even the very tail, which he had attacked with such success

in his bold stroke for the conquest of the globe of the holy Roman

empire, resisted all his efforts to knock it off. He let himself be

drummed and fifed home by the town militia towards evening. When he got

to his wife's door, he there assumed the _rôle_ of Knecht Ruprecht (the

children's "Bogie," who, on St. Andrew's Day, bestows upon them, for

the _first_ time in their career, fruit, and fear along with the same),

and, growling in a terrible manner, chucked his (wooden) apple in to

her; a piece of fun which delighted her immensely. But really I ought

not to record such little trifles.

As Firmian laid his head on his pillow, he said to his wife, "This time

to-morrow, wife, we shall know if it be two crowned heads that we are

going to lay on the pillow, or not! I shall just _recall_ this

important minute to your memory to-morrow night, when we're going to

bed!" When he got up in the morning he said, "Very likely this is the

last time that I shall rise a common, ordinary person, without a

crown."

He was so anxious to have the mutilated bird (all wet with dew, a mass

of gunshot wounds and compound fractures) once more before his bodily

eyes, that he hardly knew how to possess himself in patience till the

time came. But it was only as long as he _did not_ see the eagle that

his hopes of shooting himself into a king at him endured. He was,

therefore, delighted to agree to a proposal made by the clever Saxon,

whose bullet had throughout the proceedings always cleared the way for

his number-neighbour's; the proposal was, "we go shares in gains and in

losses--in the bird and in the cardinal." This copartnership doubled

the advocate's hopes by the process of halving them.

But these companions in arms didn't bring down a single painted

splinter the whole of the afternoon. Each in his secret heart thought

the other was the bird of evil omen; for in matters of chance we are

prone to hang our faith upon a bit of superstition, rather than to

nothing at all. The fickle Babylonish harlot went fluttering off with

that amount of bashful coyness, that the hairdresser once sent a bullet

within an ace of the fellow who was working her backwards and forwards.

At last, however, in the afternoon, he sent his Cupid's dart right

through that black heart of hers, and, by consequence, through the pig

at the same time. This almost terrified Firmian; he said that if he

couldn't hit anything himself he would accept only the head of this

pig--this polypus in the heart of the Babylonian _fille de joie_. All

that was left of the bird was its _torso_, which stuck to its perch

like the very Rump Parliament, which these pretenders to the crown

would so fain have dissolved.

A regular running musketry fusilade of eager interest, enthusiasm,

emulation, now went flashing from breast to breast, fanned by every

puff of powder which rose in smoke as a rifle went off. When the bird

shook a little all the competitors shook also, except Herr von Meyern,

who had gone off, and--seeing what a state of excitement everybody was

in, especially our hero--marched away to Madame Siebenkæs, thinking

that he had a better chance of becoming, in _that_ quarter, king of a

queen than he had here of acquiring the sovereignty of the riflemen.

However, my readers and I shall slip into the Siebenkæs' chamber after

him presently.

Twice already had the seventy numbers loaded in vain for the decisive

shot; the obstinate stump still stuck glued to its perch, and scarce so

much as trembled; the poor tantalised hearts were torn and pierced by

every bullet that sped on its course. Their fears waxed apace, so did

their hopes, but most of all their curses (those brief ejaculatory

prayers to the devil). The theologians of the seventh decade of the

present century had the devil often enough in their pens--in their

denials or in their assertions of him--but the Kuhschnappelers had him

far oftener in their mouths, particularly the upper classes.

Seneca, in his 'Remedies for Anger,' has omitted the simplest of all,

the devil. True, the Kabbalists highly extol the therapeutic powers of

the word Shemhamphorash, which is a name of a diametrically opposite

character; but I have observed, for my part, that the spotted,

malignant fever of wrath, so readily diagnosed by the raving delirium

of the patient, is instantly relieved, dispersed, and mitigated, by

invoking the name of the devil, which is perhaps, indeed, quite as

efficacious a remedy as the wearing of amulets. In the absence of this

name, the ancients, who were altogether without a Satan, recommended a

mere repetition of the A B C, which, it is true, does _contain_ the

devil's name, only too much diluted with other letters. And the word

Abracadabra, spoken _diminuendo_, was a cure for corporeal fevers. As

regards the inflammatory fever of anger, however, the greater the

quantity of morbid matter which has to be ejected from the system

through the secretions of the mouth, the greater is the number of

devils necessary to make mention of. For a mere trifling irritation--a

mild case of simple anger--"the devil," or perhaps "hell and the

devil," will generally be found sufficient; but for the pleuritic fever

of rage I should be disposed to prescribe "the devil and his infernal

grandmother:" strengthening the dose, moreover, with a "_donnerwetter_"

or two, and a few "_sacraments_," as the curative powers of the

electric fluid are now so generally recognised. It is unnecessary to

point out to me that in cases of absolute canine fury or maniacal

wrath, doses of the specific, such as the foregoing, are of little

avail; I should, of course, let a patient in this condition be "taken

and torn by all the devils in hell." But what I would fain render clear

is that, in all these remedies, the real _specific_ is the devil; for

as it is his sting which is the cause of our malady, he himself has got

to be employed as the remedy, just as the stings of scorpions are cured

by the application of scorpions in powder.

The tumult of anticipation shook up the aristocracy and the sixpenny

gallery into one common whole. On occasions like this--as also in the

chase and in agricultural operations--the aristocracy forget what they

are, viz., something better than the citizen classes. An aristocrat

should, in my opinion, never for a moment lose sight of the fact that

his position with reference to the common herd is that which the actor

now a days stands in with respect to the chorus. In the time of Thespis

the whole of the tragedy was sung and acted by the chorus, while one

single actor, called the protagonist, delivered a speech or two,

unaccompanied by any music, bearing on the subject of the play.

Æschylus introduced a second actor, the deuteragonist; Sophocles even a

third, the tritagonist. In more recent times the actors have been

retained, but the chorus omitted, unless we consider those who applaud

to represent it. In a similar manner also, in this world of ours

(mankind's natural theatre), the chorus, _i. e_. the people, has been

gradually cleared off the stage, only with more advantage than in the

case of smaller theatrical ones, and promoted from taking part in the

action of the drama (which the protagonists (princes), deuteragonists

(ministers), and tritagonists (people of quality), are better fit to

do), to the post of spectators who criticise and applaud--what was the

chorus in Athens, now sitting at ease in the pit, near the orchestra,

and before the stage where the great "business" is going on.

By this time it was past two o'clock, and the afternoons were brief;

yet the saucy bird would not stir. Everybody swore that the carpenter

who had hatched it from its native block was a low scoundrel, and must

have carved it out of tough branchwood. But at last, all battered, with

nearly the whole of its paint broken away from it, it did appear to be

somewhat disposed to topple down. The hairdresser, who, like the common

herd in general, was conscientious towards individuals only, not

towards an aggregation of them, now without any scruple secretly

doubled his bullets (since he could not double his rifle), putting in

one for himself and one for his brother in arms, in the hope that this

decomposing medium might have the effect of precipitating the eagle.

"The devil and his infernal grandmother!" cried he, when he had fired

his shot, making use of the febrifuge or cooling draught above alluded

to. He now had to place all his trust in his lodger, to whom he handed

his rifle. Siebenkæs fired, and the Saxon cried, "Ten thousand devils!"

doubling in vain the dose of devils, as he had the dose of bullets.

They now, in despair, laid aside their rifles and also their hopes; for

there were more pretenders to this crown than there were to that of

Rome in the time of Galienus, when there were but thirty. This shooting

septuaginta had all telescopes at their eyes (when they had not rifles

there), that they might observe how there were a greater number of

bullets in this heaven-suspended constellation of theirs than there are

stars in the astronomical one of the eagle. The faces of all beholders

were now turned towards this Keblah of a bird, like those of the Jews

towards their ruined Jerusalem. Even old Sabel sat behind her table of

sweetmeats customerless, and gazing up at the eagle. The earlier

numbers didn't even give themselves the trouble of shaking a pinch of

powder into their pans.

Firmian pitied these oppressed hearts, swimming heavily in turbid,

earthy blood--for whom at this time, the setting sun, the bright array

of sky tints, and the broad, fair world were all invisible--or, rather,

all shrivelled up to a battered block of wood. The surest token that

these hearts were all lying fettered in the eternal dungeon of need and

necessity, was that none could make a single witty allusion either to

the bird or the kingship. It is only concerning matters which leave our

souls free and unshackled that we notice similitudes and connection.

"This bird," thought Firmian, "is the decoy of all these men, and the

money is what baits the lure." But he himself had three reasons for

desiring to be king: firstly, to laugh himself to death at his own

coronation; secondly, on account of his Lenette: thirdly, on account of

the Saxon.

The second half of the seventy gradually fired off, and the earlier

numbers began to load again, if it were for nothing but the fun of the

thing. Every one put in two bullets now. Our two Hanseatic confederates

came once more up to the mark, and Siebenkæs borrowed a more powerful

glass, screwing it on to his rifle like the finder of a telescope.

No. 10 loosened the bird from its joining to the pole. Nothing but the

sheer weight of it now retained it on its perch, for they had well nigh

saturated and incrusted the wood of it with lead (as certain springs

transform wood into iron).

The Saxon had but to graze the eagle-torso--ay, or even the perch of

it--nay, the very evening breeze had but to give an extra puff--to send

the bird of prey swooping down. He had his rifle to his shoulder--aimed

for a whole eternity (there were fifty florins hanging in the sky)--and

pulled his trigger. The powder flashed in the pan. The band had all

their trumpets ready at their lips--trumpets horizontal, music

perpendicular--the boys stood round ready to seize the fallen skeleton;

the buffoon in his excitement couldn't think of a joke to make--his

ideas were all up beside the bird; the poor, anxious, eager, excited

hairdresser drew his trigger once more, and again 'twas but a flash in

the pan. Great drops of perspiration bedewed him; he glowed, he

trembled; loaded, aimed, fired, and sent his bullet several ells, at

the least, away over the bird.

He stepped back, pale and silent, in a cold perspiration; not an oath

did he utter; nay, I suspect he offered up a silent prayer or two that

his co-partner might, by heaven's grace, capture the feathered game.

Firmian went forward, thinking as hard as he could about something

else, to keep down his thrilling excitement; aimed, not very long, at

this, his anchor in his little storms, as it hung hovering in the

twilight, fired; saw the old stump turn three times round in the air,

like Fortune's wheel, and, at last, break loose, and come pitching

down.

As, when the old French kings were crowned, a live bird always

fluttered in the air; as, at the apotheoses of the Roman emperors, an

eagle soared skyward from out the funeral pyre, so did one swoop

downward from the heavens at the coronation of my hero.

The children screamed, and the trumpets blared. One moiety of the

assemblage crowded to see who the new king was, and to have a look at

him; while the other moiety streamed crowding round the jester, as he

advanced bearing that shattered bullet-case, the eagle's body, holding

it up above the heads of the throng. The barber ran to meet it, crying,

"Vive le roi," and adding that he was a king himself into the bargain;

and Firmian moved towards the door in silence, full of happiness, but

fuller of emotion.

And now it is time that we should all of us hurry to the town to see

how Rosa fares, what kind of throne he gains _chez_ Madame Siebenkæs

(while her husband is thus ascending _his_)--a richer throne, or only a

pillory--and what number of steps he climbs towards whichever of the

two it may prove to be.

Rosa knocked at Lenette's door, and straightway entered in at it, in

order that she might not have a chance of coming and ascertaining who

was there. "He had torn himself away from the shooting-match; her

husband was coming immediately, and he would wait for him there. His

rifle had once more been excessively fortunate." It was with these

truths that he came into the presence of the alarmed Lenette, bearing,

however upon his countenance, an assumed aristocratic frigid zone. He

walked, in an easy and unconcerned manner, up and down the room. He

inquired whether this April weather affected her health at all; as for

himself, it produced in him a kind of miserable prostrating low fever.

Lenette, timid and nervous, stood at the window, her eyes half in the

street, half in the room. He glanced, in passing, at her work-table,

took up a paper bonnet shape and a pair of scissors, and put them down

again, his attention being arrested by a paper of pins. "Why, these are

No. 8's," he said; "these pins are a great deal too large, Madame;

their heads would do for No. 1 shot. The lady whose hat you were

putting them in ought really to be immensely grateful to me."

He then went quickly up to her, and, from a spot a trifling distance

below her heart (where she had a whole quiver, or thorn-hedge of

needles planted, ready for use), he plucked one out with a dauntless

coolness, and held it up for her inspection, saying, "Look how badly

this is plated; 'twill spoil every stitch you take with it." He threw

it out of the window, and evinced symptoms of being about to pluck out

the remainder from that heart (where the fates had stuck none other

than such as were "badly plated"), and stick the contents of his own

needle-book into that pretty pincushion instead. But she waved him off

with an icy, repellant, gesture, saying, "Don't trouble yourself."

"I really wish your husband would come," he said, looking at his watch.

"The king's shot must be over long ere this time."

He took up the paper cap-pattern again, and the scissors; but, as she

fixed on him a gaze of deep anxiety (lest he should spoil her pattern),

he took from his pocket a sheet of verses dipped in hippocrene, and, by

way of passing the time, he clipped this up, by wavy lines, into a

series of hearts, one within the other. This gentleman, who, like the

Augurs, always strove to carry off the _heart_ of the sacrifice--he,

whose own heart (like that of a coquette) constantly grew again as

often as he lost it (as a lizard's tail does)--he had the _word_

"heart," which Germans and men in general seem almost to shrink from

uttering, continually on his tongue, or, at all events, impressions of

it in his hand.

My belief that his motive for leaving behind him (as he did) his

needles, and his rhymeful hearts, was that he had observed of women

that they always think fondly of an absent person when they chance to

see something of his which he has left behind. Rosa belonged to that

class of persons (of both sexes) who never show any cleverness,

delicacy of perception, or knowledge of human nature, save in matters

relating to love of the opposite sex.

He now catechised out of her a number of cooking and washing receipts

of various kinds, and these, despite her cautious monosyllabicity, she

imparted--prescription fashion--in all their fulness, both of words and

of ingredients. At length he made preparations for departure, saying,

he had been most anxious for her husband's homecoming because of a

certain matter of business which he could not well discuss with him on

the shooting-ground, among so many people, and before Herr von Blaise.

"I shall come another day," he said; "but the most important point of

the affair I can mention to yourself," and he sat down before her, with

his hat and stick in his hand. Just as he commenced his recital,

however, observing that she was standing, he laid aside his hat and

stick to place a chair for her, opposite to his. His propinquity was

grateful to her Schneiderian membrane, at any rate; his odour was

paradisaic; his pocket-handkerchief a musk-bag, his head an altar of

incense, or magnified civet-ball. (Shaw has remarked that the whole

viper tribe has the property of emitting a peculiar, sweet scent.)

"She might readily see," he said, "that it referred to that wretched

lawsuit with the Heimlicher. The poor's advocate did not deserve,

indeed, that a man should interest himself in _his_ favour; but then,

you see, he had an _admirable_ wife, who _did_ deserve it." (He

italicised the word "admirable" by means of a hurried squeeze of her

hand.) "He had been fortunate enough to induce Herr von Blaise to defer

his 'no' three separate times, though he had not as yet been able to

speak to the advocate in person. But now, that a pasquinade of Mr.

Leibgeber's (whose hand was well known), had come to light near a

stove-statue at the Heimlicher's, nothing approximating to a yielding,

or a payment of the trust-fund, was to be dreamt of for a moment. Now

this was a state of matters for which his very heart bled, particularly

as, since he had been in such poor health of late, he felt only too

keen a sympathy and interest in everything; he knew perfectly well what

an unhappy condition her (Lenette's) household matters had been placed

in by this lawsuit; and had often sighed, in vain, over many things. He

should be delighted, therefore, to advance whatever she might require

for current expenditure. As yet she did not know _him_ in the slightest

degree, and perhaps could scarce surmise what he did, from motives of

the purest benevolence, for six charities in Kuhschnappel--though he

could produce documentary evidence if she liked," and he did produce

and hand to her six receipts of the Charitable Commission. I should not

be giving proof of that impartiality of character which I bear the

reputation of possessing, did I not here freely admit, and clearly

place on record, that the Venner had, from his youth up, always shown a

certain disposition to benefit and assist the poor of both sexes, and

that his consciousness that he dealt in this large-hearted manner, did

(when compared with the narrow close-fistedness prevalent in

Kuhschnappel) give him some warrant for bearing himself with a certain

amount of proper pride towards those mean and miserly beings who sate

in judgment upon his little genial breaches of the moral laws. For his

conscience bore him witness that, conversely to the process whereby

spiders are metamorphosed into jewels, he spun his shining webs (of

gold and silver), and in their meshes, wet with the glittering dew of

tears, made an occasional capture from time to time.

But for a woman like Lenette (he continued) he would do things of a

much grander description; as proofs of which, given already by him, he

needed only to point to the fact that he had set at defiance the

Heimlicher's hostility towards her husband, and that he had more than

once quietly swallowed speeches of her husband's own, such as in his

social position he had never suffered anybody to address to him before.

"Name any sum of money you are in want of; by Heaven, all you have to

do is to ask for it."

Lenette, bashful and trembling, glowed red with shame at this discovery

of (what she had believed to be) the mystery of her poverty and her

pawnings. With the view of pouring a few drops of oil on the troubled

waters, he began, by way of preamble, to make some disparaging remarks

concerning his fiancée at Bayreuth. "She reads too much, and doesn't

work enough. I only wish she could have the benefit of a few lessons

from _you_ in housekeeping. And really, a lady such as you, with so

many attractions (quite unaware of them, too, herself), so much

patience, such wonderful diligence and assiduity, should have a

very different kind of household than this place for her sphere of

action." Her hand was by this time lying still in the stocks--the close

arrest--of his; her wings and her tongue, as well as her hands, were

tied and fettered by that fainthearted incapacity of self-assertion

which is born of the sense of poverty. When women were in question, Mr.

Everard's longings and likings paid no heed to boundary-marks; but

rather strove hard to obliterate them, and get rid of them altogether.

Most men, in the wild, unreasoning whirl of their appetites, are like

the jay, which tears the carnation to tatters in order to get at its

seeds.

Upon her downcast eyes he now riveted a long gaze of fondness, not

withdrawing it, however, when she raised them up; and, by dint of

keeping his eyes very wide open, and thinking with great vividness on

pathetic and touching subjects, he managed to squeeze out about as much

water as would have sufficed to make an end of a humming bird of the

smaller sort.

In him, as in a fine actor, all false emotions became for the time real

and genuine; and when he flattered any one, he at once began to respect

him. As soon as he felt there were tears enough in his eyes, and sighs

enough in his breast, he asked her if she had _any idea_ what was

causing them. She looked innocently, and with kindly alarm, into those

eyes of his, and her own began to overflow. This greatly encouraged

him, and he said, "It is the fact that _you_ have not such a happy lot

as you deserve."

Ah! selfish pigmy! at such a moment you might have spared this poor,

anxious, trembling soul, sinking, well nigh, in an ocean of tears for

all the long, long past.

But he knew no sorrow save of the theatrical, the transient, the petty,

and the sham sort; and so he spared her not.

Yet that which he had expected would prove the bridge from his heart to

hers, namely, sorrow, became, on the contrary, the portcullis barrier

between them. A dance, or some _joyful_ tumult of the senses would have

brought him further with this _commonplace_, every-day, honest, and

upright woman than three pailfuls of selfish tears. His hopes rose

high, as he laid his flowery, sorrow-laden head upon his hands, down

into her lap.

But Lenette jumped up with such a suddenness that it nearly knocked him

over altogether. She gazed inquiringly into his eyes. Upright women

must, I think, have some instinct of their own concerning the

lightnings of the eye, by means of which they can distinguish between

the lurid flashes of hell and the pure coruscations of heaven. This

profligate was as little aware of the flashes of his eyes as was Moses

of the brightness of his countenance. Her glance shrunk before his

scorching gaze; at the same time I feel it incumbent on me as an

historian--seeing that readers by the thousand (and I myself into the

bargain) are all up in arms to such an extent against this defenceless

Everard--not to conceal the fact that Lenette had had her mind's eye

firmly fixed upon certain rather rude and free-handed sketches which

Schulrath Stiefel had drawn for her of the manœuvring grounds of

rakes in general (and this one in particular), and, in consequence, had

pricked up her ears in alarm at each move he made, whether in advance

or in retreat.

And yet every word I write in defence of the poor rascal will only tell

against him now; indeed, there are many ladies whose acquaintance with

the Salic Law (or Mr. Meiner's work) teaches them that in former times

the penalty for touching a woman's hand was the same as for hewing off

a man's middle finger, namely, fifteen shillings, and who, being

indignant with Rosa for his hand pressures, would fain have him to be

duly punished therefor. I am convinced that these ladies would by no

means be pacified were I to go on speaking in his extenuation, for they

have doubtless learnt, out of Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of

Denmark,' that formerly persons who kissed without leave, and against

the will, were, by the law of the land, liable to be banished. And

there are very many women of the present day who are strictly governed

by the ancient pandects of Germany, and, in the case of lip-thieves

(since, in the eye of the law, banishment and confinement to one place

are held to be tantamount and equivalent one to another), they adjudge

them--not, it is true, to be _banished from_ their chambers, but to

_remain in_ them; similarly, they lodge debtors (to whom they have

given their hearts, and who insist on retaining possession of the same)

in the Marshalsea of the Matrimonial Torus.

When Rosa jumped up (as before set forth), he had nothing to urge in

extenuation of his false step but an aggravation or augmentation of it,

and accordingly he fairly took the marble goddess in his arms---- But

at this point my progress is barred for a moment by an observation

which has to be made ere I proceed; it is this: There are many kindly

beauties who cover their retreats or make amends for their denials by

concessions. By way of making themselves some amends for their hard

services in the campaign of virtue, they offer no resistance at all in

matters of the smaller sort, skilfully abandoning a good many

intrenchments and outworks (in the shape of words, articles of dress,

and so on), to enable them to deftly steal a march upon the enemy and

outmanœuvre him--just as clever generals burn the suburbs that they

may fight the better up in the citadel.

My sole object in making this observation is to point out that it did

not apply to Lenette in any respect whatever. Pure as she was in soul

and in body, she might have gone straight away into heaven just as she

stood, without changing so much as a stitch of her attire--have taken

her eyes, heart, clothes, everything except that tongue of hers, which

was uncultivated, rude, indiscreet; so that her resistance to Everard's

attempted burglary on her lips was unnecessarily grave and discourteous

(considering what a trifling case of orchard-robbery it really was),

much more so than it would have been had Lenette been able to drive the

Schulrath's highly-coloured prognostics concerning Rosa out of her

head.

Rosa had anticipated a denial of a less unpleasant kind. His obstinacy

availed him nothing as against hers, which was the greater of the two.

A gnat-swarm of firm and passionate resolves buzzed about his ears; but

when at length (probably inspired thereto by the Schulrath) she said,

"Your lordship remembers that the Tenth Commandment says, 'Thou shalt

not covet thy neighbour's wife'"--from the crossroad between love and

hatred, on which he was standing, he suddenly made a great jump--into

his pocket and brought out a wreath of artificial flowers, "There!" he

cried, "take them, you nasty, inexorable creature! just this one

forget-me-not as a souvenir; devil fly away with me if I want anything

further!" If she _had_ taken it, he _would_ immediately have wanted

something further; but she turned her face aside and repulsed the

silken garland with both hands. At this the honeycomb of love in his

heart soured into very vinegar; he grew wild with fury, and throwing

the flowers right over the table, he cried, "Why, they are your own

pawned flowers--I redeemed them myself--so take them you _must_." On

which he took his departure, not, however, without making his bow,

which Lenette, all hurt and offended as she was, ceremoniously

returned.

She took the envenomed wreath to the window, to have a better light to

examine it by. Alas! these were indeed, and beyond all doubt, the very

roses and rosebuds whose steely thorns were wet with the blood-drops

from a pair of pierced hearts. Whilst she, thus weeping and bowed

beneath the weight of her woe, stunned and stupid rather than

observant, stood at her window, it suddenly struck her as a strange

circumstance that the torturer of her soul, though he had gone rattling

down the stairs in a hurry with noise enough, had never gone out at the

street-door. After a long and attentive watch, during which anxiety,

closely bordering upon terror, assumed the _rôle_ of comforter and

spake louder than her sorrow (the future, at the same time, driving the

past out of view), the becrowned hairdresser came galloping home (the

crown of his hat pointing heavenwards), and shouted to her in a mere

parenthetical manner as he dashed by, "Madame the queen!" for his great

idea was, that before anything else he should rush home, and there on

the spot, and without a moment's delay, make proclamation of the

kingship and queenship of four persons.

There now devolves upon me the duty of conducting my readers to the

corner where the Venner is cowering. From Lenette he had _descended_

(in two senses of that word) to the hairdresser's wife, one of that

common class of women who never so much as dream of an infidelity all

the year round--for no horse in all the kingdom is harder worked--and

commit one only when there appears on the scene some tempter, whom they

neither invite nor resist, probably forgetting all about the incident

by the time next baking day comes round. On the whole, the superiority

which the female middle-class is disposed to arrogate to itself over

that of a higher rank, is just about equally great as it is

questionable. There are not a great many tempters in the middle-class,

and those there are are not of a very tempting sort.

Like the earthworm, which has ten hearts that extend all the way from

one end of it to the other, Rosa was fitted out with as many hearts as

there are species of women; for the delicate, the coarse, the

religious, the immoral--every sort, in fact; he was always ready with

the appropriate heart. For as Lessing and others so frequently blame

the critics for narrowness and onesidedness in matters of taste,

inculcating upon them a greater universality of it--a greater power of

appreciation of the beautiful, to whatsoever times and nations

belonging--so do men of the world also advocate a universality of taste

for the _live_ beautiful, on two legs, not excluding any variety of it,

but deriving gratification from all. This taste the Venner possessed.

There was such a marked distinction between his feelings for the

wigmaker's wife and for Lenette, that, in revenge upon the latter, he

came to the determination, on the stair, to take a jump right over this

distinction and slip in to pay a visit to the landlady, while her

narrow-chested husband was away scheming and plotting in confederacy

for a crown in another quarter. Sophia (this was her name) had been

always combing at wigs in the bookbinder's on the occasions when the

Venner had been sitting there on the business of getting his novels and

life romances done up and bound, and there they had communicated to one

other, by looks and glances, all that which people are not in the habit

of confiding to third parties. Meyern made his _entrée_ into the

childless abode with all the confident assurance of an epic poet, who

soars superior to all prefaces. There was a certain corner partitioned

off from the room by boards: it contained little or nothing--no window,

no chair, a little warmth from the sitting-room, a clothes-cupboard,

and the couple's bed.

When the first compliments had been exchanged, Rosa took up a position

behind the door of this partitioned space, for the street passed close

by the window, and at this late hour he was anxious not to give

occasion to unpleasant surmises on the part of passers by. Of a sudden,

however, Sophia saw her husband run by the window. The intent to commit

a sin may betray itself by a superabundance of carefulness and caution;

Rosa and Sophia were so startled at the sight of the runner, that she

begged the young gentleman to get behind the partition until her

husband should go back to the shooting-range. The Venner went stumbling

into the _sanctum sanctorum_, while Sophia placed herself at the door

of it, and, as her husband entered, made as though she were just coming

out of it, closing the door after her. The moment he had stuttered out

the news of his elevation in rank, he darted out of the room, crying,

"She upstairs there knows nothing about it yet." Gladness and hurried

draughts of liquor had just blurred the sharp outlines of his lighter

ideas with a thin haze or fog. He ran out and called "Madame Siebenkæs"

up the stairs (he was anxious to be off again so as to join the

procession). She hastened half way down, heard the glad news with

trembling, and, either by way of masking her joy, or as a fruit of a

warmer liking for her husband now that fortune seemed kinder to him (or

it may have been, perhaps, _another_ fruit which joy commonly bears,

namely, anxiety, or shall I name it fear?), she threw down to him the

question, "Is Mr. von Meyern out yet?"

"What! was _he_ in my room just now?" cried he, while his wife echoed,

unbidden, from the door, "Has _he_ been in the house?" "He was here,

upstairs," Lenette replied, with a touch of suspicion, "and he hasn't

gone out yet."

The hairdresser's suspicions were now awakened, for the consumptive

trust no woman, and, like children, take every chimney-sweep they see

for the devil himself, hoof, horns, tail and all. "Things are not all

exactly as they should be here, Sophy," said he to his wife. The

passing brain-dropsy, induced by what he had drunk during the day and

by his half-share in a throne and fifty florins, had the effect of

screwing his courage up to such a pitch that he secretly formed the

idea of treating the Venner to a good sound cudgelling in the event of

his coming upon him in any illegal corner. Accordingly he started upon

voyages of discovery, first exploring the entrance passage, where

Rosa's sweet-scented head served him as a trail, or lure; he followed

this incense-pillar of cloud into his own room, observing that this

Ariadne's thread of his, this sweet odour, grew stronger as he went.

Here among the flowers lay the serpent--as, according to Pliny,

sweet-smelling forests harbour venomous snakes. Sophia wished herself

in the nethermost of Dante's hells, though in fact and reality she

_was_ there already. It dawned upon the hairdresser that if the Venner

would only stay where he was, in the closed titmouse-trap of the

partitioned corner, he should have bruin safe in his toils;

consequently he reserved till the last a peep into the said corner.

What is historically certain is, that he seized upon a pair of

curling-tongs wherewith to probe the dark corner and gauge the cubic

contents thereof. Into its dark depths he made a horizontal lunge with

his tongs, but encountered nothing. He next inserted this probe, this

searcher of his, into more places than one--firstly, into the bed,

next, under the bed (taking this time the precaution to keep opening

and shutting the tongs, which were not hot, on the chance of some stray

lock of hair getting caught in them in the darkness.) However,

all this trap captured was air. At this juncture he came upon a

clothes-cupboard, the door of which had always stood gaping ajar for

the last six years or so; the key had been lost just that time, and in

this slipshod household it was a matter of necessity to keep this door

open, otherwise the lock would have snapped to, and there would have

been no getting in. To-day, however, this door was close shut. The

Venner (in a profuse perspiration) was inside; the _friseur_ pressed

the lock home, and then the net was fairly over the quail.

The hairdresser, now master of the situation, quietly took the command

of his establishment at his ease; the Venner could not get out!

He despatched Sophia (as red as a furnace and loudly dissentient,

though forced to obey) for the locksmith and his breaching implements;

however, she quite made up her mind to come back with a lie, not with a

locksmith. When she had marched off he fetched Fecht, the cobbler, up,

to be at once his witness of and his assistant in that which he

proposed to accomplish. The shoe-stitcher crept into the room softly at

his heels; the phthisic haircurler went up to the canary-cage and

addressed the bird imprisoned therein (tapping the while with his tongs

on the gate of this fortress of Engelsburg) as follows: "I _know_ you

are in there, honourable Sir, make a move; there's nobody here but me,

as yet (there'll soon be more). I can break the cupboard open with my

tongs and let you out." Laying his ear close to the door of this

Spandau, he heard the captive sigh.

"Ah! you are puffing and panting a little, honourable gentleman," said

the wigmaker; "I am here at the door by myself now. When the locksmith

comes and breaks it open, we shall all see you, and I'll call the whole

house; but all I shall ask to let you jump out now, quietly, and be off

unseen, will be a mere trifle. Give me that hat of yours, and a

shilling or two, and give me your custom."

At length the miserable prisoner knocked upon the door and said, "I

_am_ in here; just let me out, will you, my man, and I'll do all you

say. I can help, from the inside, to break open the door." The wigmaker

and the cobbler applied their battering apparatus to the "parloir" of

this donjon-keep, and the captive bounded forth. During the breaking

open of the gates of jubilee the friseur parleyed or negotiated a

little more, and amerced the anchorite in the locksmith's fee; at

last, bringing Rosa forth, like Pallas in her mail, when she issued

from Jove's cranium into the light of day, "The landlord," said Fecht,

"couldn't have managed the job without me."

Rosa opened his eyes wide at the sight of this auxiliary deliverer from

the house of bondage, took off the sweet-smelling hat (which the

cobbler immediately clapped on to his own head), shed some drops of

golden rain from his waistcoat-pocket upon the pair, and, in dread of

them and of the locksmith's arrival, fled home bareheaded in the dark.

The friseur, whose bald pate was so near to the triple crown of the

emperors of old, and the popes of the present (for the eagle gave

him a crown, the Venner a hat, and his wife had nearly placed

something else----),--however, the friseur, in high satisfaction of

this new martyr-crown of felt, which he had been envying the Venner

the possession of all the afternoon, went back with it to the

shooting-ground, that he might have the gratification of marching home

in company with his co-emperor, attended by their subjects and their

vassals.

The wigmaker took his hat off to his royal brother Siebenkæs (that hat

so much more worthy of a co-king than his former one), and told him

something of what had been happening.

The Heimlicher von Blaise smiled his Domitian smile to-day more

affectionately than ever, which made the bird emperor far from

comfortable; for friendliness and smiling make the heart colder when it

is cold to begin with, and warmer when it is warm--just as _spiritus

nitri_ does water. From a friendliness of this particular kind nothing

was to be expected but its opposite, as in ancient jurisprudence

excessive piety in a woman was merely a proof that she had sold herself

to the devil. Christ's implements of torture became holy relics; and,

conversely, relics of saints often become implements of torture.

Under the twinkling gleams of the wide, starry firmament (where new

constellations kept bursting into view, in the shape of banging

rockets) the grand procession marched along. The competitors who had

come after the king's shot had fired their rifles in the air, by way of

salute to the royal pair. The two kings walked side by side, but the

one who belonged to the guild of wigmakers found some difficulty in

standing (what between joy and beer), and would gladly have sat down

upon a throne. However, over these seventy Brethren of the Eagle, and

the two vicars of the empire, we are losing sight, and delaying to

treat of something else.

To wit, the town militia, who are also present, or more properly

speaking, the Royal Kuhschnappel Militia. Concerning this regiment I

think a good deal, and say only about half what I think. A city or

county militia regiment--and particularly the Royal Kuhschnappel

Militia--is a distinguished and important body of men, whose _raison

d'être_ is to scorn and show contempt for the enemy, by always turning

their backs upon him--showing him, in fact, nothing _but_ backs, like a

well-ordered library. If the enemy has anything in the nature of

courage, then our said force sacrifices to Fear like the ancient

Spartans; and as poets and actors ought in the first place to

experience and picture to themselves in a vivid manner the emotions

they are about to portray, the militia endeavours to give an

illustration, in itself, of that panic terror into which it would fain

throw the enemy. Now with the view of affording these men of war (or

"of peace" if you prefer it) the necessary amount of practice in the

mimic representation of terror, they are daily put through a process of

being terrified at the city gates. It is _called_ "being relieved."

When one of these men of peace is on sentry, another of them, a comrade

of his, marches up to his sentry box, shouts out words of command at

him in a warlike tone of voice, and makes hostile and threatening

gestures in close proximity to his nose; the one who is on sentry also

cries out in a similar voice, goes through certain motions with his

weapon, and then lays it down and gets away as fast as he can; the

conqueror in this brief winter campaign retains possession of the

field, and puts on the watchcoat which he has taken from the other man

by way of booty; but that they may each have an opportunity of being

terrified by the others, they take the part of conqueror turn about. A

warrior of this peaceful order may very often be most dangerous in

actual war, when, in the act of bolting, he happens, in throwing his

rifle away with the bayonet fixed, to throw it too far, and harpoon his

too proximate pursuer with it. Militiamen of this sort ("precious" they

are in every sense) are usually posted, for greater security's sake, in

public places where they are safe from injury, such as the gates of

towns, where these harpooners are protected by the town and gate; at

the same time I have often wished, in passing, that these students of

the art military were provided with a good thick stick, so that they

might have something to defend themselves with if anybody should try to

take away their muskets.

It will appear to many that I am but artfully cloaking the shortcomings

of the militia in these respects; I am prepared for this--but it is not

difficult to perceive that this species of praise also applies to all

small standing armies of lesser principalities--forces which are

recruited only that they may recruit. I shall here utter myself on this

subject a little. Vuillaume recommends educators to teach children to

play at soldiers, to make them drill and mount guard, in order to

accustom them, by this play, to firm and active habits both of body and

of mind; in short, to render them firm and upright. This soldier-game

has been carried on for a considerable time already in Campe's

Institute. But is Mr. Vuillaume really ignorant that scholar-drill,

such as he recommends, has been long since introduced by every good

prince of the empire into his dominions? Does he suppose it is anything

new when I tell him that these princes seize upon all strong young

fellows (as soon as they attain the canonical height) and have them

drilled, in order that they, the State's children, may thus be taught