BOOK II.

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’tsendme 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, thoughhewould 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 couldnothelp 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 thiscours de morale, thiscollegium pietatisof 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 aboutalmostas 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, donotgo 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 itat 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 cannotstand. 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 Ican’thear 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 cannotstand, is aquietnoise.”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 forwardBEFOREthe soup came in (for if a womanONCEforgets 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, atestimonium 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 letyourwork interruptmine. 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 somethingin 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 surehehas 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 himselftohimself 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 itwasdue. 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 candlesin 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, herchevaliers 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 ofme,” 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 merelyhisobstinate 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 forhim, 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 cannotcomprehend. 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 screechingunharmonical 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 theevening? 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 yousay(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,aproposof 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 charmingchiaroscuro, 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 thinkingseesa 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,oughtnot 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, shehardly ever left offsnuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.“Don’t snufftoooften, darling,” he said, at length, but very, very kindly. “If you attempttoofine 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 youcan. It’s only for a short whilebeforeandafterthe snuffing,entre chien et loupas 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 forhim; 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 neverbeginningpayment—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 oftoolong 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;shesaid whateversheliked. 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 ironsaucièrebecause 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 inexpressiblygentlerequest: “Oh! please, Firmian, donotsell 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 whichmustnecessarily 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 hereadhim, but only when heheard 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 theRubrum(the red title), and theNigrum(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 thefive 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.”“NoTINMENespecially,” 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 makinghis.” 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 futureYONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter futureHERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

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’tsendme 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, thoughhewould 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 couldnothelp 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 thiscours de morale, thiscollegium pietatisof 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 aboutalmostas 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, donotgo 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 itat 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 cannotstand. 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 Ican’thear 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 cannotstand, is aquietnoise.”

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 forwardBEFOREthe soup came in (for if a womanONCEforgets 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, atestimonium 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 letyourwork interruptmine. 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 somethingin 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 surehehas 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 himselftohimself 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 itwasdue. 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 candlesin 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, herchevaliers 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 ofme,” 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 merelyhisobstinate 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 forhim, 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 cannotcomprehend. 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 screechingunharmonical 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 theevening? 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 yousay(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,aproposof 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 charmingchiaroscuro, 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 thinkingseesa 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,oughtnot 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, shehardly ever left offsnuffing, particularly after he had nodded his head once or twice by way of thanks.

“Don’t snufftoooften, darling,” he said, at length, but very, very kindly. “If you attempttoofine 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 youcan. It’s only for a short whilebeforeandafterthe snuffing,entre chien et loupas 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 forhim; 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 neverbeginningpayment—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 oftoolong 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;shesaid whateversheliked. 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 ironsaucièrebecause 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 inexpressiblygentlerequest: “Oh! please, Firmian, donotsell 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 whichmustnecessarily 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 hereadhim, but only when heheard 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 theRubrum(the red title), and theNigrum(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 thefive 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.”

“NoTINMENespecially,” 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 makinghis.” 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 futureYONDER, and we sorrow for ourselves as if there were no brighter futureHERE. For all our passions are born Atheists and unbelievers.

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