Part 12
"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 Roeper, from Amsterdam. For this reason, as the Moluccas have suffered by _special_ (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 Roeper, 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 Roeper without his name. When the reader has read this digression, he will say it was none at all.
NUMBER TWENTY-ONE.
An Imperfect Character, such as are for sale to Romance-writers at the Publishing Office of the Gazette.
"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-associe; 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, as _ensophos_ [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 Roeper 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--a _diploma of nobility_. His honor was happily restored to health by the Imperial Chancery of Vienna.
"As he had no _community of goods_ with 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 so _vice versa_. So the dropsical craves more water the more he is swollen with it; as his _water_ ebbs, 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 Roeper); besides there is a remarkable deficiency here in genuine knaves; nay, if I should compare even Roeper 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 Roeper 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 my _materia medica_ the 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 frock _a 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, false _tours_ among 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 a _digitus medicus_;[46] his finger-hat [as we Germans call the thimble] a doctor's hat....
"Why did I forget thee, noble Beata? No _parure_ can 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 is _killingly 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 the _soul_ of many persons (surely hers also) is too delicate and refined for this marshy earth, so, too, is the _frame_ of 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 womanly _point 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.