PASTOR GRUNELIUS: And what if I were to tell you that the man has already completed four volumes, and I believe the thing has not yet run its course.
UNGER: No, Pastor, give me that! In the debate between Mr. Moritz and his student, I would at least like to be the tertius gaudens and actually look at something the man wrote.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Read aloud, Mr. Unger! Our society is really far too refined. None of us has ever seen anything by Spieß.
UNGER: As you wish, my gentlemen, as you wish. But I think we’ll limit ourselves to the Preface.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Let’s say, a small section of it. That should suffice.
UNGER: “Can I expect thanks,” writes this Spieß:
Can I expect thanks, if I warn those who stray away from the abyss; is it my duty to caution the parched wanderer against taking a precipitous draught from that cool well through which he will meet his death? If so, then I have fulfilled it, and can ask you, dear Reader, to take the content of this little book to heart. Insanity is terrifying, but more terrifying still is how easily a man can fall prey to it. Overwrought, violent passion, deluded hope, lost perspective, and often merely fancied dangers can rob us of that precious gift of our Creator, our understanding — and what mortal can boast that he was never himself in a similar position, and, it follows, in the same danger? When I relate to you the biographies of these unfortunates, I wish not only to awaken your compassion, but also to offer you excellent proof that each was the author of his own misfortune, and that accordingly it remains in our power to avert similar misfortunes. Admittedly, I cannot hold out against the torrential current if I dare recklessly to venture into its depths, but he who convinces me of its depths through examples and warns me of the imminent danger before I have stepped from the bank deserves my thanks and praise. How richly, how sublimely, would I think myself rewarded were my stories to restrain the gullible maiden, the careless young man, from the execution of a bold plan that could someday rob them of their understanding.25
MORITZ: Indeed, perfidious enough. No wonder that made it into the best houses.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: Yes, Deputy Headmaster, there you have the greatest failing of our entire current educational system. We enlighten man as to his natural virtue and original disposition, and then come these enthusiasts, pietists, genius-worshippers, Sturm und Drang-ers, to make fog and renewed agitation out of everything again.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Look here, my dear man. That should give you cause to reflect. I mean, you and your colleagues should ask yourselves why your Apostle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the preacher of nature and virtue, was such an unnatural and unvirtuous man. In short: to a positive theologian, your entire Enlightenment can’t seem much more than a man who needs a candle lit in front of his nose on a sunny day.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: No, Pastor, we don’t wish to argue in this way. It is not the right tone. I believe the Deputy Headmaster would call something of that kind argumentatio ad hominem, which is unworthy of a citizen of the academy. Come at me with Rousseau in this way, and I could come at you with Lavater, who so well understood how to connect positive religion to a hodgepodge of mysticism, genius, and enthusiasm, that over time, as you know, all serious readers were frightened off.26
MORITZ: Worst of all, however, is that such people then believe they must follow a career educating children. I recently ran across the Ethical Primer for Country Children.27 And I must confess that I believe — of course, one shouldn’t say this — but I believe nonetheless, I did it better in my Logic for Children.28
WAITER: If the honorable sir would forgive me a thousand times, but if the gentleman would step to one side, because I would like to light the lamps in the store window — and then, no offense, Mr. Businessman, but there is a gentleman here who has been waiting twenty minutes for the “News” to become available. And if you would be so charming as to trade it with him for the Cotta’sche Zeitung.29
UNGER: With plaisir, my friend, with plaisir. — I can only wonder, Deputy Headmaster, at how the classifieds are getting out of hand. Can you believe that a week ago I found a wedding announcement in the Journal?
MORITZ: I don’t know if you read the Leipziger Zeitung, but I have heard they publish entire pages filled with nothing but classified ads. But in England that was already customary in the newspapers fifteen years ago.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: I believe, my good gentlemen, that everything that ties the newspapers more closely to civic life, to the everyday, is to our advantage. In my opinion, newspapers should not be written only for men of state and members of Parliament, nor just for professors and scribblers. Newspapers belong in the hands of everyone.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: You would not wish in the end, esteemed sir, to see the newspapers in the hands of the uneducated public. You see, I don’t want to say that I am au courant on everything these gentlemen are discussing, but you can trust me on one thing: as a pastor, I am better placed than anyone to survey the appalling epidemic of reading to which our public has fallen prey — and the less educated they are, the more hopeless it is. People read today who would not even have thought about books twenty years ago. And in my youth, if the citizen or craftsman took up a book, then it was an honest, time-honored tome, a chronicle, an old herbal, a homily. But today? The bourgeois girl who belongs in the kitchen is reading her Schiller and Goethe in the hallway, and the uncouth country girl trades her spindle for Kotzebue’s plays.30 My dear brother, the High Court preacher Reinhard, is absolutely right when he says that domestic problems — concerning which one hears so many complaints — can be directly traced to this ghastly habit of reading.31
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: This much is true — as I recently read at the German Museum — musketeers in the big cities are borrowing books from the lending library to take with them to the barracks.
UNGER: The lending library. Yes, there you have said it. They are the source of all our misery.
PASTOR GRUNELIUS: Forgive me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but when you speak of musketeers, I can tell you which books they are bringing to the barracks. I had the opportunity recently to cast a glance into a consignment they sent to the Grand Consistory for appraisal. I will tell you the titles, my good gentlemen, nothing but the titles: Augustea, or the Confessions of a Bride before Her Wedding; The Story of Justine, or So It Must Be to Remain a Virgin; The Peregrinations of Henriette. And for something of this kind one indicates Istanbul or Avignon as the place of publication, to thumb one’s nose at the censors.
FIRST MAN OF LETTERS: I certainly don’t wish to take up the defense of such books, but shall I tell you whom we have to thank for them? Those selfsame censors, esteemed sirs, who provided us with their miserable edict of July 9, 1788.32 It is the censor who robs the common man of respectable and beneficial writings, and turns his curiosity and desire to read toward the most cunning imposters. You know as well as I that it was only because of the censor that our Berlin Monthly had to move to Jena. That they suppressed the publication of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,33 that they have forbidden Mr. von Humboldt to print two absolutely innocent lines on a garter in celebration of the marriage of the duchess of Lottum,34 that they…