I should be doing and writing foolishly,--inasmuch as we all, readers as well as inhabitants of this biography, have so near an interest in Scheerau; since Gustavus, its hero, is going thither as cadet; as I, his tutor, come from there; as Fenk, the Doctor, is already there, and as Fenk may yet be of importance in this history,--if, in defiance of all these reasons, I should not insert three papers of Dr. Fenk's. I refer to two newspaper articles and one letter, which were written by the Pestilentiary.
I am well aware that it is known to a few eminent strangers who have traveled through the higher circles of Scheerau, that the Doctor writes a periodical, which is not printed, namely, a written gazette, ornouvelles à la main, such as several capitals possess. Villages have printed newspapers, small towns oral, capital cities manuscript ones. The paper is Fenk's Marforio and Pasquino, who give out his satirical medicines.
Hisfirstnewspaper article I weave in, if only on account of the journal for Germany. This so flat and wordy journal--for else it were written neitherbynorforGermany--refused to insert a good treatise of mine which I sent in, on the extraordinarily flourishing state of trade in Scheerau, because, perhaps, no government in Germany is less known than that of Scheerau. Verily one would think this principality were hiding itself like a whale under the icy crust of the Polar seas, so unknown are the most weighty pieces of intelligence regarding it; such,e. g., as this, that we Scheerauers since the new dynasty have drawn to ourselves the whole East Indian trade, and annexed the Moluccas, whence we now ourselves fetch our spices, which the Government, by an autographic order, imports from Amsterdam. But this is just what appears in the first newspaper article:
The Brandenburg Pond at Bayreuth is an excavated lake of five hundred days' labor, and some months ago I sat in it an hour, for they are drying it up just now for the benefit of the pale dwellers on its shores. The Scheerau pond, at which four Regents in succession kept men digging, has one hundred and twenty-nine days' work more, and is of great importance to Germany, for by its aërostatic vapors it will, as effectually as the Mediterranean Sea, change the weather in Germany, so soon as the wind passes over either. Ebb and flow must, strictly considered, take place even upon a tear or in the drinking-cup of a greenfinch; how much more in such a piece of water. The diocese of islands, which so adorns and supplies this pond,e. g., Banda, Sumatra, Ceylon, and the beautiful Amboyna, the great and little Moluccas, has only under the present administration come out of--or rather into--the water. Herr Buffon, were he still living, and other natural philosophers, must needs be struck with the fact that the islands in the Scheerau Ocean have arisen not by the up-piling of corals, nor yet by earthquakes, that crooked up the dromedary backs of the sea-bottom out the water, nor even by any neighboring volcano which had sown these mountains in the sea; for Sumatra, the great and the little Moluccas, were merely shoved along in small parts on innumerable hand-carts and horse-carts to the coast, and as these cars contained stones, sand, earth, and all the ingredients of a fine island, in this way the feudal tenants, whether of the sovereign or the nobility, who were, in fact, so many (tobacco)-smoking and island-forming volcanoes, were able in a short time to complete the Moluccas, while the bridges of the nobility over the royal waters are not yet begun. The intention of the sovereign is to have the whole East Indian trade at Asia in Scheerau as close at hand as a snuff-mill, and I think we have it, only with the distinction that the spice islands of Scheerau are still better than the Dutch. On the latter one has to wait and watch for the pepper, the nutmegs, etc., to ripen; but on ours all is found ripe and dry already, as one has only to rub it on his food; this comes from the fact that we simply order all these fruits betimes from--Amsterdam. The way is this:
"Either all or nothing is a Regale [or Royal prerogative]. The legal expert cannot justify it that princes, although they lift the costliest but rarest products to the rank of regalia, nevertheless leave the common, but so much the more prolific ones, in the hands of their subjects, and thereby impair the revenue. The jurist finds with the princes of Southern Asia, despotic as they otherwise are, more consistency, for they take not the game, or salt, or amber, or pearls, but the whole land and the whole trade, and merely farm both yearly. The German princes have greater advantages in this direction than any others, for all European kingdoms have Indian possessions--have a New England, New France, New Holland; but a New Germany old Germany has not, and the only land which a prince has left him to take away is his own, unless one could contrive to make out of Poland or Turkey a New Austria, New Prussia, etc.
"But this no regent has hitherto discerned, except the Prince of Scheerau, who laid these propositions before his privy council, but had before the voting already formed his resolution: that now the people should get all their spices of him. He himself now, like nature, creates on his Moluccas the spices which his country consumes, in that he causes the seeds of these spices--pepper, nutmegs, etc.--to be imported, not, however, for planting, but for cooking, through the commercial agent von Röper, from Amsterdam. For this reason, as the Moluccas have suffered byspecial(or spice-) defraudation, a pepper-and-cinnamon cordon of cadets and huzzars encircles the land; no one could smuggle in a nutmeg, unless it were a Muscat pigeon in her tough gut. All that my Scheerau readers get at the shops--the establishment may belong to a great, house which keeps more ships and bummers on their legs than I do compositors, or it may have been hired by a poor hawker whose sign already moves my pity, whose waste-book is a slate and his stock-book a greasy shop door, and whose goods are brought in not by ship, but as land freight, under the arm and on the shoulder,i. e., on a stick over the shoulder--in either case the Scheerau reader chews products from Moluccas which are under his nose.
"Any one who can properly estimate such a state of things, will heartily agree with the spice inspector, who writes in the Scheerau Intelligencer, (1) that now the country might get pepper and ginger at a lower price, simply because the government would be able to order it in larger, consequently in cheaper, quantities; (2) that the Regent would now be in a condition to wean the Scheerauers, first of all the Germans, from these luxuries which empty our purse over India, by merely raising the price considerably, and (3) that a new department of public service would get a livelihood.
"I need not apologize for the fact that our Prince--as the Russian Empress gives the city charter to villages--bestows insular rights upon rubbish-hills, or that he gives them East-Indian names, since every simpleton of a seaman can represent to the greatest island, and that too when he has rather discovered than created it, the person of god-father. Our Sumatra is one-fourth of a quarter-square league, and grows mainly pepper--the island of Java is still larger, but not yet completed--on Banda, which is three times as large as the concert-hall, nature furnishes nutmegs, on Amboyna cloves--on Teidore stands the pretty country-seat of a well-known Scheerauer (the resident Doctor himself)--the little Moluccas which are dotted into the lake I can, with their products, thrust into my waist-coat pocket, but they have their merit. Whoso has never yet been in any seaport, in any haven, may travel hither to that of Scheerau and be a witness himself, any afternoon, what the commerce is in our days, which the united hands of all nations maintain--here he can form an idea of merchant-fleets, whereof he had so often but blindly read, and which he here actually sees sail over our pond--he can see the so-called spice-fleet of the commercial agent Herr von Röper, which like a torrid clime distributes the necessary spices which he has ordered, among all the islands--he can also come upon poor devils who on little rafts fetch from the East Indies the few goods, which they dispose of by the pennyworth--in port and on shore, where he himself stands, he can observe what the coast-trade is which the so-called huckster-women carry on in a small way with ginger-nuts and walnuts."
End of Number Sixteen.
* * * *
The second part of the Fenkian newspaper is a description of this very commercial agent von Röper without his name. When the reader has read this digression, he will say it was none at all.
"In Romance, as in the world, there are no perfectly good characters; but neither, on the other hand, will either readers or his fellow men be pleased with one who is out and out a knave--he must be merely half or three-quarters of one, as it is with everything in the great world, whether honor or vulgarity or truth or falsehood.
"In the publishing office of this paper there is a half-knave who is offered for sale to any romance-writer in Scheerau, for the little which they can afford to pay for him. I assure Messieurs the writers, that I do not at all exaggerate the imperfections of this knave, for the sake of disposing of him at a higher price; the owner will take the knave back again if he proves not to have malice enough.
"This imperfect character was reared in the states of the Church and born on the borders of Lower Italy; and after his baptism and majority bought himself hatchels and mouse-traps. The fewest possible Germans know that the Italians, with whom this branch of business flourishes, can overreach us immensely. Our character soon raised himself from hatchel-commissioner to hatchel-associé; he disposed of the mouse-traps, which he ordered from Italy, in Germany, and the mouse-holes were his Ophir and the flax-fields his mint-towns. The hatchels which he sold before the purchase of his patent of nobility, he knocked off at five and a half guilders.
"He must, even before his birth, have, in the other world, dealt in a great house; for he brought with him a ready-made mercantile soul. It was stupid in me not to have mentioned sooner: when, as a boy of nine years old, he had the small-pox, he opened a little shop, and traded in the pock matter, which people took from his dispensary, that is from his body, for purposes of vaccination. He never gave out any matter gratis, but demanded his money for it, and said he was a pock-seedman, only a young beginner. This trade with his own manufacture, nature and the Doctor soon suppressed, and the latter said he was as dear as an apothecary. Hence he even undertook to be one himself.
"And he did become one, only according to the Mecklenburg idiom; for in that every furnishing store is called an apothecary's shop.[42]That is to say, in Unter-Scheerau he changed his religion and his business and built himself a shop which was to buyers a mere hatchel and mouse-trap. Here he kept for himself a shop-boy, a man-cook, a friseur, a barber, and a reader of morning papers. All these persons were personated by one, is own, this was and did all, asensophos[or Jack of all trades.]
"Since with our knave, as an imperfect character, virtues must be mineralized into faults--otherwise I would not offer him to any romance builder--therefore let no one take it ill of me that I also bring forward his white side to set by his black one, as on Bohemian tables they always place side by side white and black dishes.
"In those days he always went forth from his shop on Sunday, though with all permissible parsimony, still well-dressed. His hat, his ring-finger, and his vest, were bordered with genuine gold; his stomach and his calves were enclosed by the work of the silk-worm, and his back was covered by the produce of the English sheep. It is quite in keeping with human malice to call that extravagance which was in this case a rare and covert beneficence; all that the imperfect character had on consisted of pawns; for in order to cure people of pawning, he threatened every one that he would wear every article on which he lent money, as long as it remained in his hands. In this way he weaned many a one, and the clothes of those with whom humane warnings availed nothing he actually put on after dinner on Sunday. It was therefore less from a want of taste than from an absence of avarice and hardness, that just as he bore in his own person several menial personalities united, so also he wore several dresses, and came forth as variegated as a rainbow, or as a clothes-moth, that eats its way through from cloth to cloth.
"As I am so perfectly sure that he was not spoiled by prodigality, however much he may have the appearance, I will remove all such appearance by the statement that he every Saturday bought his pound of flesh for his bachelor's hall, but--for otherwise it would still prove nothing--did not eat it. He did, indeed, eat one and with the spoon; but it was that of the previous Saturday. That is to say, the imperfect character fetched every Saturday his holy meat from the stall and ennobled and decorated therewith his Sunday greens. But he appropriated nothing to himself except the vegetable part. On Monday he had the animal portion still and seasoned with it a second dish of greens. On Tuesday the cooked-over flesh worked with new fire at the culture of a fresh cabbage. On Wednesday it had to ogle before him with faint fat-eyes [or spots of grease] floating on another cabbage-soup--and so it went on, till at last the Sunday appeared when the soaked-out rag of flesh came itself to the dinner, but in another sense, and Röper actually ate the pound. So, too, with a pound of Leibnitz's, Rousseau's, Jacobi's,[43]thoughts one may boil vigorously whole ship-kettle-fulls of original leaf-work.
"This parsimony the imperfect character alloyed still more with some degree of deception. He interpolated the articles which he had received in good condition, and wrote back he had received them in a bad condition, they were so and so, and he could only allow for them half price. A third of the price he thus by a clever enough legerdemain whisked out of the buyer's distant pocket. Wares, casks, bags, which had in his house only a relay-station and were to travel on farther, paid out to him a transit-toll through a little hole he made in them, by way of paying himself therefrom the little which might be charged to the carrier if it was missed. He got up a mint-cabinet or hospital for poor amputated invalid gold pieces. To other depreciated coins he gave back the honorable name which they had lost, and compelled his factors to accept them as legitimated and rehabilitated. No matter in how bad a condition a gold piece might have come into his house, he treated it as an officer and never dismissed it without promotion. Thus do such nobler souls cover even the faults of money with the mantle of Charity.
"In this way his commercial stock and real estate enlarged more and more, and in his heart, brooded over by the friendly warmth of the public, there stirred, like an infusorium in its egg, a faint, featherless, transparent thing, which he called Honor. The imperfect character appropriated to himself, therefore, the character of commercial counsellor.
"And now, when he had caught honor fairly by the wing and fixed it upon paper, he could more readily offend against it than before, when he had it not yet among his papers. He accordingly made his declaration of love to the richest and most avaricious father of a beautiful daughter, whose love for another--an officer--had already led her to take the last step. The daughter hated his declaration of love; but the character with the aid of the father, possessed himself of her struggling hand, drew her by it to the altar, screwed on the ring, and impaled her hand in his. Her second child was his first.[44]
"Meanwhile as his honor, after these bleedings and voidings, could not well be kept on its feet, he had to be thinking about hanging on its neck a good, strengthening amulet, Loyola's-metallic-plate, a manifesto-of-Luke-and-Agatha--adiploma of nobility. His honor was happily restored to health by the Imperial Chancery of Vienna.
"As he had nocommunity of goodswith his wife, but only with his creditors, he released himself from the mercantile profession by an innocent failure and found a refuge for himself and his clear conscience and his wife's goods and his own at his country seat, in order there to serve his God.
"I mean his Gods;--friends, the imperfect character had none. His ideas of friendship were too noble and lofty, and demanded the purest and most disinterested love and devotion on a friend's part; hence he was disgusted with the low blockheads around him, who desired not his heart but his purse, and who pressed him to their bosoms merely that they might squeeze something out of him. He could not so much as bear to have such selfishness in his presence, and his house, therefore, like the human windpipe and Sparta, could not bear to have in it any foreign thing. He believed with Montaigne, that no one could properly love more than one friend, as well as one mistress; hence he bestowed his heart upon a single person, whom of all he prized most highly--namely his own--this he had tried and proved; its disinterested love for him it was that enabled him to attain Cicero's ideal, who wrote, that one could do for a friend anything, even base things, which one would not do for himself.
"He is the greatest stoic in all the territory of Scheerau; he not merely says that all pleasures are vanity, but he even despises all temporal good, because it cannot make him happy. This contempt of such is not indeed to be supposed inconsistent with the most earnest striving after it, because a philosophor, as the stoics in the note[45]say, will prefer a life in whose furniture there is so much left as a wire-brush or a stable-broom, to one in which merely this little were wanting, although he is not made any the happier thereby. Hence the imperfect character sets as much store by the least effects (as old Shandy did by the least truths) as by the greatest; accordingly he must make his fire of nut-shells, seal his letters with wax torn off from old ones, write his own letters on the blank spaces in those of his correspondents, etc. The Imperfect Character has herein a resemblance to the miser, who makes a profit out of similar trifles, and whom no reasons can refute; for if I may not throw away a penny, I may not a farthing, half a farthing, 1000th of a farthing; the reasons are the same.
"There is in man a terrible tendency to avarice. The greatest prodigal might be made something still worse, the greatest niggard, if one should give him so much as to make him account it much and worth increasing; and sovice versâ. So the dropsical craves more water the more he is swollen with it; as hiswaterebbs, his thirst ebbs with it.
"The imperfect character thanks heaven for two things: first, that he has fallen into no avarice, secondly, into no extravagance--that he does not deny his wife or his child anything, gives them everything, and only in the case of stupid people, who want to have means of prodigality, takes such means out of their hands, as the old Germans, the Arab and the Otaheitans steal from strangers only, but never from inhabitants--that he is chaste and would sooner untie the money-purse of a merchant than the girdle of Venus--that if he had as many pennies as such or such a one, he would fly to the help of the poor in a very different manner--but nevertheless he no more allows himself to be robbed of his bit than the mourner does of his sorrow, and that at the Last Day the question will be put to him, whether he has gained interest on his pound (sterling).
"This vendible character in the publishing office is, like an English malefactor, stock and seller at once, and will expect nothing of the romance writer for his whole being except a copy gratis of the romance into which he is thrown."
So far Fenk, who could bear all men, but no monster, no skinflint, I have secured this imperfect character for my biography (for he himself exists even biographically under the name of Röper); besides there is a remarkable deficiency here in genuine knaves; nay, if I should compare even Röper with the devils of the Epic Poets and myself with the Poets themselves, neither of us would look very big.
If my readers had a letter of Dr. Fenk's, excusing his former severity--which reminded us of Scheerau, of the Doctor and of a person very dear to me, and which fits in exactly with the whole narrative--they would insert this letter also in the biography. I have that same letter and the same privilege, and splice it in here:
Fenk to Me.
"Accept the poor bearer of this as your client; the Maussenbacher has screwed on to the poor devil his suction-works and quite exhausted him, and now leaves him in the lurch. None of all the knaves and advocates in Scheerau will serve him as patrons against a rich nobleman, for they wish to get the latter one day as their own.
"I am myself, indeed, daily in Maussenbach, and pleading; but the niggard accepts no disinterested arguments; and for all else Röper has feeling and reason. There will yet come a time when one will find it as hard to comprehend our past stupidity, as we our future wisdom: I mean, when one will be unable to tolerate, not merely, as now, any beggars, but even any millionaires.
"Of the father of a beautiful daughter one constrains himself to think well. I force myself to do so, too: in thy piano-pupil Beata, thou sawest only the green leaves under the bud; now thou mightest see the opening rose-leaves themselves and the fragrant nimbus around them. Such a daughter of such a father! In other words: the rose blooms upon a black web of root-fibres sucking in nourishment from a filthy soil.
"I am here for the purpose of curing her: the old man will have something for his money; but in Maussenbach no one reflects on a saying of the Abbe Galiani, who was buried four days before I left Italy, that women are perpetual patients. Merely, however, in the nerves: the most sensitive are the most sickly; the most rational or the coldest are the healthiest. If I were a prince, I would make a princely resolution, and in a rescript from my most illustrious hand would make it a case of house-arrest, if a woman drank so much as a single spoonful of medicine. You poor misguided creatures, why have you in general so much confidence in us men, and us doctors in particular, as to be pleased that we, tapping the glasses of physic one after another in the medicine-chest, take you to drive in a medicine-carriage until we transfer you to the carriage that bears you on your last journey?... So have I said to them many a time, and each time they have only taken the more willingly all the medicines I prescribed for them.
"The only kind of medicine that helps women more than it hurts them is certainly dress. According to many naturalists the life of birds is lengthened by moulting, and that of women, too, I add; for they are always ailing until they have on a new plumage. This is not easy to explain on therapeutic principles, but it is true; and the more distinguished one is, consequently the more sickly, the oftener is he obliged to moult, as the swamp-salamander also sheds his skin every five days. A female crab, waiting for a new shell, cuts an awkward figure in her hole. Every poison can become an antidote, and it is certain that clothes can give sicknesses,e. g., hectic, plague, etc.; so must they, under the direction of a sensible physician, be able to remove sicknesses. An enlightened Medicus will, in my opinion, if Halle's domestic dispensary,i. e., the wardrobe, fails to give relief, take his recipes from no other dispensary than the Auerbach cellar in Leipsic. As thou canst therewith fly to the help of many a fair invalid, I will furnish thee out of mymateria medicathe following medicinal neckerchiefs, dresses, etc.
"For steel-medicines: steel-rosettes, and steel-chains.
"The precious stones which were formerly supplied from apothecaries' shops are even now good to be used outwardly.
"Bouquets, provided they are of silk, are probated medical plants, and by their perfume strengthen the brain.
"Shawls are healing to the breast, and (not a red thread, which is a superstition, but) a necklace with a medallion is, according to modern physicians, serviceable to diseased necks.
"With Peruvian bark much imposition has been practised, but the genuine is a frocka la Peruvienne.
"As, according to the modern surgery, all wounds are healed by mere covering, so, instead of the English taffeta plaster, mere taffeta on the body renders the same service.
"A new visiting-fan is, in violent swoons, indispensable; but whether a muff should be classed among emollient remedies, falsetoursamong setons, and a parasol among cooling medicines, and dress-trimmings under the head of trusses and bandages, this question one or three hundred cases cannot yet settle.
"We prefer to insist upon this, that a frizzling comb is a trepanning-instrument for headache, a repeating-watch for an intermittent fever, and a ball-dress is a panacea.
"And so, therefore, to speak jocosely, the ladies' tailor is an operator; his sew Lug-finger adigitus medicus;[46]his finger-hat [as we Germans call the thimble] a doctor's hat....
"Why did I forget thee, noble Beata? Noparurecan cure thee; and if at some future day thy fair heart should grow sick, nothing would heal it but the best heart or death....
"Wonder not at my fire. I have just come from her and forget all faults of hers which a fortnight ago I still knew. Maidens, who are often sick, accustom themselves to wear a look of patient resignation which iskillingly beautiful.[47]have underscored her favorite expression, but only from her own tongue can it flow in the sweetest dying cadence. To this patience she is trained not only by her everlasting headaches, but also by her father, who equally torments and loves her, and who, to do her a pleasure, would (according to the egotism of avarice) kill off a world. If thesoulof many persons (surely hers also) is too delicate and refined for this marshy earth, so, too, is theframeof many, which can stand nothing harsher than humming-bird weather and vales of Tempe and Zephyrs. A tender body and a tender mind fret each other. Beata, like all of that crystallization, inclines a little to enthusiasm, sensibility, and poetry: but what sets her high up in my eyes is a sense of honor, a modest self-respect, which (according to my small experience) is an inheritance not of education, but of the kindliest destiny. This dignity secures, without prudish anxiety, female virtue. But if one must educate into the soul, nay preach into it, this womanlypoint d'honneur, ah, how easily is such a sermon overcome!
"Women, who respect themselves, are encompassed with so full a harmony of all their movements, words, looks!... I cannot depict her; but such ones are subjects to be depicted, who resemble the rose, which, down below, where one does not pluck them, has the longest and hardest thorns, but above, where one enjoys them, clothes itself only in a panoply of soft and bending ones.
"I know not whether it is with thee an old story, that daughters tell their mothers every truth and all secrets; to me it is something new, and only one best daughter, Beata, can do it.
"A fortnight ago I recollected a fault of hers not so faintly as to-day, and it is this--that she has too little pleasure in--pleasure, and too much in mournful fancies. There are souls of too great tenderness, that can never be happy (as well as never feel offended) without weeping, and who receive a great piece of good fortune, a great kindness, with a sighing bosom. But when such come into the presence of coarse natures, that cannot guess the hidden gratitude and the dumb joy, they are forced to assume hypocritically not the feeling but the expression of it. Beata's father demands for every present he makes, whose value he weighs even to an apothecary's grain, an exultant and exuberant joy; she, on the contrary, at most, does not feel one till some time after; the apparition of one or another light streak of fortune sends a gleam all at once out over the whole line of her sad days, which lie like graves in her memory. In this Beata I also notice, what I have often before, that woman's body and soul are too tender and excitable, too fine and too fiery for intense intellectual exertion, and that both need, to sustain them, the constant diversion of household labor; the superior women are less injured by diet than by their eccentric sensibilities, which drive their nerves like silver wire through smaller and smaller holes, and thin them out from vermicelli into geometrical lines. A woman, if she had the fiery soul of a Schiller, and should compose therewith one of his pieces, would in the fifth act herself die with the hero.
"I understand thy amorous interrogating articles very well: it is true, the Privy-legation-counsellor von Oefel is a frequent visitor here. He seems, indeed, to have no more tender business here than mercantile, and not to require anything ordered by the commercial agent, except pepper for Ceylon and nutmegs for Sumatra, consequently least of all his daughter and her goods. It is also true that the minister's lady, that toll-and-alms-box of male hearts, forms one of the party, and has Oefel's heart alreadyhookedoreyedto her charms; but the devil trust privy-legation-counsellors, especially Oefels. I tell thee, whether he entrap Beata or not, in either case I wonder at it. Thou wilt, of course, console thyself with this, dear Jean Paul, that, in the first place, thou hast greater attractions than he, and secondly, art quite unconscious of having these attractions, which, in conversation, has a great effect. There may well be something in it; for Oefel aims not so much to please, as merely to show that he could please (if he pleased), and he therefore allows himself all sorts of whims, merely that one may have something to blame and to forgive and he something to make good; he is also--for a courtier and a diamond must have, beside hardness, pure colorlessness in order to reflect foreign hues and lights more faithfully--he is too vain even for a courtier, and buys with another's favor only his own. I will console thee with still more 'it is true's' before I bring on my 'buts.' Beata, it is true, looks as if she were asking herself every minute, why do I not admire him? the minster's lady looks as if she were askingherevery minute, 'why dost thou not envy me, when my vassal is like myself a piano-forte with a hundred stops and pedals?'--for he keeps no one position and can venture into any one; every movement seems to flow from the other; his soul changes its positions as playfully as his body, and bends over as gracefully as a fountain in the wind to the remotest matters; nothing confuses him, but he every one; he knows a hundred exordiums to one sermon, begins for the sake of beginning, breaks off for the sake of breaking off, and knows no more than his hearers what he is after--in short, he is a rival, dear Paul!--I can now properly introduce the promised But.
"But although my fair patient overlooks him so coldly, as one who is trying on us a dress, he, however, assumes the opposite, and throws at her fire-balls to illuminate himself, and aeolypiles or smoke-balls for her obscuration, and is already, in advance, cutting mint-stamps for his future medals of victory. Men or manikins like Oefel have such a superfluity of truth, that they are obliged to give it not to one alone, but to distribute it among a thousand women; Oefel would fain command a whole female slave-ship; meanwhile he cares as little about thee as about the minister's lady, who loves him, because it is her latest lover, and whom he loves, first, because in her triumphal chariot, to which formerly a number of ninnies were harnessed, he would be glad to draw alone as thill-horse; and, secondly, she possesses more art and less feeling than he, and persuades him that it is precisely the reverse.
"That I may now weave our Beata, whom thou wouldst gladly get into thy life and into thy book, into the life and the book of Oefel (he is upon me also), for this reason, dear Paul, I have delivered so many cabinet-sermons to old Röper to the point that the sickliness of his daughter is to be overcome not by one but by several hundred physicians,i. e., by society--that the old man will give her a society or rather will give her to one, without himself giving her the necessary alimony. He wants to transplant her into some bed or other of the court-garden: 'She, too, shall, with the rest, gain knowledge of the world,' he says, and has none himself. He would, if he could, drag and crush down the whole female world from its altars and pedestals and presidential chairs and regular seats to milking-stools and work-benches and foot-stools; nevertheless his own daughter shall have Jews and diamond-dust grind facettes and angles of radiance upon her, which he himself hates. Once at court, the legation-counsellor will see her every day--and Jean Paul isnowhere.
"This Jean Paul asked me in a sly way, whether he might not act as lawyer to the father of the aforesaid daughter, because he, said Jean, had heard of the resignation of the present one. Herr Kolb, however (the lawyer in question), is still there, and still quarrelling; says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Röper's that I know;' while Röper says every week: 'If every one knew the tricks of Kolb's that I know;' and so the two are glued together by mutual apprehensions. Besides, just now, the thing is not to be thought of; for in fourteen days old Röper receives the oath of allegiance from his manor. A miser dreads to change or to risk anything.
"Why dost thou let thy good sister stay so long in the arsenical fumes of the court? Is what she can gain there worth as much as what she brings with her and may lose there, her pure, tender, though volatile heart? On my tours I thought otherwise, but now in solitude, a coquettish insect, a coquet-crab, creeping now forward and now backward, that keeps opening her great and little shears and always reproduces them as fast as one tear's them off, who instead of a heart carries in her breast a stomach, and yet, like all insects, is cold-blooded, such an incrusted female crab is more revolting to me than a shelless one in the moulting period of sensibility, which is too soft, and out of which romance-writers make the delicate crab-butter. Sensibility improves with years, coquetry grows worse with years. Why dost thou not take thy Philippina home? To these questions Jean Paul has vouchsafed no answer; but to his I have; for I do not take vengeance; I could wish rather the said Paul were pressing Beata's fingers to-day on wrong fingers rather than on the right keys, and that now in the spring-time of her years she looked round beseechingly beside the piano toward Paulus and illumined him with the heaven of her broad blue eyes; the poor devil, even this Paul, would no longer know himself, and would say: Without a beautiful eye, for all other beauty I would not give a doit, much less myself; but for a pair of heavenly eyes I forget all contiguous charms and all contiguous faults, and all Bach and Benda, what they are, and my mordants and the false fifths and much more. Farewell, forgetful one!Dr. Fenk."
We understand each other, hearty friend! whoever has once written satires himself can forgive all satires upon himself, especially the most malicious, only not dull ones. But, though the doctor has carried on the fight in jest, still I must inform such readers as reside at a distance from Scheerau, without reference to myself, that the aforesaid Legation-counsellor, Oefel, is the most insignificant fellow that either of us has ever known; is one who is only less embarrassed among women, but always so among men, and in a small circle far more than in a large one, not to say that he is always seeking and hunting after that attention which modest people carefully shun, namely, general attention. If he succeeds in getting this elsewhere, he shall not have it in my book.... The following case is, to be sure, impossible, especially on account of the cursed long- and short-legged ortrochaicsupports and consoles on which my torso rests; but still a man can picture to himself the impossible case, which is this, that I should one day appear before my Beata with a declaration of love, and so, contrary to my own expectation, be myself the hero of this biography and she the heroine. I am regularly dumfounded, for what I would be really saying and supposing is that I became Röper's lawyer, and next thing, in fact, (for I should be every court-day "sweet," or asweet creature, as a woman expresses herself, who belongs more to thefairthan to theweakersex) absolutely his son-in-law. With pleasure would I, for the good and sympathetic reader's gratification, describe all biographically.... But as has been said, the thing is, unluckily, quite impossible, so far as I can see into the future; and this merely by reason of a cursed unsymmetrical wire-pedestal, which, to be sure, he whom his ill-fortune has fastened thereto would fain make good by a thousand glazings and rasures, and on which Epictetus likewise for a long time stood.
In the heat of my feelings I have been carried quite out of my biographical plan; it was hitherto to have been cleverly kept from the reading world (and the thing was successfully done) that none of all these adventures are yet old, and that in a short time the life of these persons will go on hand in hand simultaneously with my biography. But now I have fired off all my powder. On the whole a new section must, now be commenced, that shall contain more sense....
Fourteen days after Fenk's letter ... But are readers to be relied on? I know not how it happens with the German reader, whether from a splinter in the brain, or from an effusion of lymph, or from deadly debilitation, that he forgets every thing a writer has said, or it may come from constipation or from irregular discharges, anyhow the author has to bear the brunt of it. Thus I have already spread the information over a multitude of sheets by compositors and printers for the benefit of the reader (but to no effect), that we have 13,000 thalers in the Prince's hand, which are to come to us; that I have, it is true, never studied the Jura; that I did, nevertheless, while I was undergoing my examination as an advocate, contrive to pick up many a nice juristical crumb, which now stands me well in stead; that Gustavus is to be a cadet, and I am bent upon being a justiciary; that Ottomar is invisible and even inaudible, and that my Principal squanders too much.
Unhappily it cannot be otherwise: for so long as he knows of an apartment or a stable without cubic contents of an animal nature, he hangs out his fishing-rod for guests. Like our modern women, he is never well except in a social hurricane and a thicket of visitors; he and these women come up out of such a livingmen-and-women-bathas rejuvenated and regenerated as out of anant-and-snail-bath. He never can flatter himself upon having herein the least resemblance (to say no more) to the Commercial Agent Röper, who in the solitude of a sage and a capitalist silently reflects upon house-mortgages and arrears of interest, and who knows that his castle possesses only cup and pitcher privilege,[48]and therefore no one can be entertained over night. Falkenberg, hearken to the biographer! Close now and then thy purse, thy door, and thy heart. Believe me, fate will not spare thy generous soul. Fortune in her race will run over and cut in pieces with her wheel thy soft heart, to empty her loto-wheel behind her bandage before a Röper. O friend! he will take from thee all that thou would'st give to others' misery or thy own enjoyment, not even leaving thee the courage to bury thy shamed heart with its wounds in the bosom of a friend!--and then how will it fare with thy son?
And yet!--I blame thee onlybeforehand; butafterward, when thou hast one day made thyself miserable by making others happy, then wilt thou find respect in all good eyes and love in every good breast!
... Fourteen days, then, after Fenk's letter, when my pupil was already eighteen years old, but still without the position of cadet, there sat at my principal's lodgings abureau d'espritof Bohemian noblemen, with fiery Pentecostal tongues and March beer. I had nothing to drink or to say, but made one of the company. I could never refuse my good captain, but added one, if not to the guests--(one does not begin to prize fully men of a certain too great refinement till one is away from them among men of a certain coarseness)--yet to the people. Many persons are, like him, visiting press-gangs and cannot bid people enough together, yet without knowing why or wherefore, and without any real affection for them. Falkenberg would invite the deaf and dumb. It has its consequences for my readers that I said: "To-day Röper receives the oath of allegiance." Falkenberg, who was fond of speaking ill of others, and doing nothing but good to them, and who would gladly strew peas in the path of his absent hereditary foes,i. e., misers, and yet sweep them away again just as they were about to slip on them, was charmed with my idea and his own. "We must all," said he, "ride over to-day just to vex him (Röper)." In six minutes the drinkingbureau d'espritand the tutor were on their nags; but not Gustavus. He was made for a finer enthusiasm than a noisy one. Hence Gustavus'sinner lifeoften involved me with his father (who demandedoutwardlife) in the tedious and useless attempt on my part to convince him wherein the exalted worth of his son properly lay. For a tutor who stands upon his honor, such a thing is too disagreeable.
We saw, as we sat on our horses,Maussenbach, which stood before its nobleBoyar,[49]and placed the feudal crown on his Italian head. Beside the homage-receiving liege-lord stood his judicial department, his excise college, his privy government, his department of foreign affairs--namely, Herr Kolb, the magistrate, who represented all these colleges in his own person. This miniature ministry of the miniature sovereign stood on a meadow holding a long letter in its hand, from which it read out to the people all that was to be sworn. The hundred hands of the confederation then passed in succession through the two hardening hands of Kolb and Röper, and promised gladly to obey the nobleman, if he, on his part, would promise to command.
Butafter pleasure comes pain, after hereditary homage abureau d'esprit.... In the eighteenth century, certainly, many men have been scared, and very much so,e. g., the Jesuits, the aristocrats, also Voltaire and other great authors have often been considerably frightened; but no one in this whole enlightened century was ever so scared as the commercial agent when he saw what was coming; when he saw fifteen human heads and fifteen horses' heads between an artillery train of hands, marching down from above over the hill, who, collectively, had nothing to seek in his palace, but enough to find. But as, in the second place also, no one in the eighteenth century was seldomer at home than he--he, indeed, was so, but crouched down behind plate-glass windows or behind fire-proof wall or gabion, because, like a ring of Gyges, they rendered him invisible--accordingly, he might have found a refuge and withdrawn himself from so many mammalia as many miles off; but out on the meadow it was not to be done. A jolly man, and though he were a miser, will make others jolly: Röper started, shuddered, resigned himself to his fate, and welcomed us more joyfully than we dreamed. He continued in the giving mood to-day, because he was once in the way of giving.
For his vassals who had to-day sworn away their good sense must also drink it away; some two buckets of stuff which tasted as sour as the means by which it had been earned he had released as prisoners from their dungeons on the coronation day--he had had the casks which held the liquor not so much inscribed as whitewashed and certified[50]or clarified with double chalk and had had scouring balls of chalky earth let down into them in hammocks so long that at last the beverage was too good to make a present of. The skinflint seeks to save, even while he bestows. For the rest he moved about among his feudal subjects more familiarly and generously than with us ennobled guests;--"this is the way a man always acts, who has no pride of nobility," says the reviewer; "but this is the way the niggard always does," say I, "to whom meaner but silver-veined men are of more account than guests that take what is due to their rank, and who places a servant of his own above an outside friend, and utility above dignity."--Louisa (Mrs. Commercial Agent von Röper), attached to every beer-ark of her husband's a small shallop beside; his gifts were with her always a pretext for making privy supplements thereto. Only she charged the village magistrate to keep a sharp look-out that none of her yeast should be wasted. Nature had given her a free and loving soul; but this very love for her husband left her at least the appearance of his fault.
Thou true heart! let me linger for a few lines upon thy connubial disinterestedness, which counts all thy own virtues as sins and all thy husband's as virtues, and which no praise pleases but that which is given him whom thou surpassest! Why didst thou not fall to the lot of a soul which should imitate and understand and reward thee? Why have there been apportioned to thee for thy sacrifices, for thy heart-rendings here below, no pain-stilling drops but those which fall for thy sake from the fair eyes of thy daughter?
Ah, thou remindest me of all thy sisters in suffering--I know, indeed, full well, from my psychology, ye poor women, that your sufferings are not so great as I imagine them, for the very reason that I imagine and do not feel them, as the lightning, which at the distance of its appearing grows to a fiery snake, is in reality only a spark, which shoots through several moments; but can a man, ye feminine souls, conceive the inward calluses and gashes which his coarse, weapon-hardened finger must produce in your delicate nerves, since he does not deal with you even as you do with him, or as he himself does with the soppy, slimy caterpillars, which he does not venture to take away except with the whole leaf whereon they lie? And then, too, a Louisa and a Beata! But wereJean Paulonly your lawyer, as the old man has promised, he would give you solace enough....
But the old man is a poor stick to lean on; does he not creep round through all Lower Scheerau, voting in beforehand all advocates into his judiciary, in order to draw off us counsellors, by the hope of serving under him, from the purpose of serving against him? Meanwhile, however, he must deal honestly withone, and that is myself.
When the Bohemian chivalry and I went from the esplanade into the palace, they and I stumbled upon something very lovely and something very absurd. The absurd was sitting by the lovely. The absurd was called Oefel, the lovely was named Beata. Heaven should give an author atimeto paint her and aneternityto love her; Oefel I can have done painting and loving in three seconds. It was an honor to me and to her, that she at once recognized in her old piano-teacher the old acquaintance; but it did not afford me any pleasure that she did not detect in the well-known one a something unknown, and that she did not remember at the sight of me, that she, from a child had become a woman. There is an age when one does indeed forgive the fair, even if they do not notice and do not accept us. Oh, I forgive thee everything, and the greatest proof of it is this, that I speak of it. The young youth admires and desires at once; the older youth is capable of merely admiring. Beata's words and feelings are still the dazzling white and pure fresh snow, just as they have fallen from heaven: no footprint and no step of age have yet smutched this splendor. She was to-day still more beautiful than ever, because she was busier than ever and lent her fair shoulders to her mother's burdens; the palelunar-aurorawhich once left the whole heaven upon her cheeks white, now suffused it with a rosy reflection; even the joy of others for which she was to-day active, gave her the heightened color which she usually lost by her own. The maidens know not how very much occupation beautifies them, how much upon them as on doves' necks the plumage plays and sparkles when they move about, and how very much we men resemble beasts of prey, who will not seize any creature that keeps a fixed position.
Her mother joyfully communicated to me the reason why the counsellor or legation was sitting there: he had brought Beata an invitation from the Resident Lady von Bouse to come to her country-seat, where my sister also is. The new palace Marienhof lies half a league from the city; as an annex of the new one Oefel occupies the old, which is perhaps connected with it by secret doors. He impolitely gave it to be surmised that without his fine intriguing--i. e. he made, like the advocates, a bridge instead of a leap over the slenderest brook--the thing would have gone lamely. It is impossible that such a vain fool should stamp a slate-impression of his heart on so precious a stone as Beata. Even though the ninny should in future besiege her every afternoon in the new palace, as he will do, nevertheless I can rely upon what I say--nay I would swear to it. A coxcomb of his magnitude may, to be sure, force one or two angular, mossy, country-damsels (as happened this very day) into an amorous amazement at his bell-polypus gyrations, at his audacity, his sense (i. e., wit) and his immodesty in saying, instead of ladies and the fair sex, merelywomen:thathe can do, and more too, I say; but from Beata's heart all her virtues will eternally separate him; she will, by the side of his love for the minister's lady, not see nor believe his love forherat all; she will open her soul to no sentimental flourishes of an Oefel, which, like counterfeit gold, are now too large and now too small. She will find, rather, there is more chance with an honestJean Paul; she will, I hope, readily forgive the said Jean Paul the resemblance he may bear in some traits to Oefel, as he is free from the faults of the latter, and stands before her with a true, modest heart, which has hardly the courage softly to breathe upon her the finest gold-leaf of praise, and which, even if misunderstood, is silent, and shrinks back even without having made the attempt. She will, in her decision, steer just as widely away from the old country damsels as I from the young country squires, who sat there in the company. For Oefel's appearance took from them all former wit and sense, and his quicksilvery politeness filled all their limbs with lead; in a falcon-baiting where such a bird pounced upon female hearts, they drew their clumsy wings to their sides and in virtue of their manly sincerity admired, instead of the female charms, his: Jean Paul, on the contrary, remained as he was, and did not let himself be put upon.
I should be leading many a German circle to the presumption of a secret jealousy on my part, if I said nothing at all in praise of Oefel: he promised on the same afternoon to do my pupil a great service. I must premise, that, although he rented the old palace near the resident lady's he did not lodge there, but in the Scheerau cadet-house, wherein he moved from room to room, in order--as his high rank did not allow him to dress singularly--that he might at least act singularly; his object was to study men there, in order to have them engraved on copper. That is to say, he was composing a romance as a short encyclopædia for hereditary princes and crown-tutors, and wrote on the title-page "the Great Sultan." This Fenelon made the harem of his Telemachus into a mirror-chamber, which imaged the whole female court of Scheerau; his work was aherbarium vivum, a flora of all that grows on and around the Scheerau throne, from the prince down--if he still remembers me--to me. When it appears, we shall all swallow it, because in it he has swallowed us all. The reviewers will find nothing in it, but will say: "trivial stuff!" As he never did any thing which he did not before and afterward trumpet to the world, of course even my Captain had heard that he had so long and so finely intrigued with the Cadet-General, that he got leave at last, in the place of an inspecting officer, to occupy and exchange chambers in the cadet schoolhouses; and thus our prince came to the help of this natural historian of men with a human menagerie, just as Alexander did to Aristotle with one of beasts. The Captain, therefore, with his victorious good-heartedness, came to him and begged him cleverly to intercede with the Cadet-General for his Gustavus, that the latter might one day come under his standard. Protector Oefel said the thing was already as good as arranged; he was himself enraptured with the vision of getting a singular genius who had been educated under ground for a room-mate and a sitter.
The refraction of light always shows the land to sea-men some hundreds of miles nearer than it really lies, and by a so innocent illusion fortifies them with hope and pleasure. But in the moral world also the beneficial arrangement exists whereby princes and their ministries keep usprayer-offerers(as Campe would say instead of suppliants) cheerful and lively, in that they, by an ocular illusion, make us see the court-places, offices, favors, which we covet, always some hundred miles or months nearer--(so much nearer, we think we can actually touch them)--than they really are. This illusive appearance of approximation is even then useful as well as usual, when the spiritual or secular bench which is shown in such nearness to the sitters on the long bench of expectancy, proves at last to be nothing in fact but a--bank[51]of cloud.
The Commercial Agent (the Captain said to me on the way homeward) is after all not so bad a fellow as you make him out--and the legation-counsellor needs in fact only to grow in years.