by Mark Twain
“Fifty pieces of gold!”
“A hundred!”
“Two hundred!”
“Three!”
“Four!”
“Five hundred!”
“Five twenty-five!”
A brief pause.
“Five forty!”
A longer pause, while the auctioneer redoubled his persuasions.
“Five forty-five!”
A heavy drag—the auctioneer persuaded, pleaded, implored,—it was useless, everybody remained silent,—
“Well, then,—going, going,—one,—two,—”
“Five hundred and fifty!”
This in a shrill voice, from a bent old man, all hung with rags, and with a green patch over his left eye. Everybody in his vicinity turned and gazed at him. It was Givenaught in disguise. He was using a disguised voice, too.
“Good!” cried the auctioneer. “Going, going,—one,—two,—”
“Five hundred and sixty!”
This, in a deep harsh voice, from the midst of the crowd at the other end of the room. The people near by turned, and saw an old man, in a strange costume, supporting himself on crutches. He wore a long white beard, and blue spectacles. It was Herr Heartless, in disguise, and using a disguised voice.
“Good again! Going, going,—one,—”
“Six hundred!”
Sensation. The crowd raised a cheer, and some one cried out, “Go it, Green-patch!” This tickled the audience and a score of voices shouted, “Go it, Green-patch!”
“Going,—going,—going,—third and last call,—one, two,—”
“Seven hundred!”
“Huzzah!—well done, Crutches!” cried a voice. The crowd took it up, and shouted altogether, “Well done, Crutches!”
“Splendid, gentlemen! you are doing magnificently. Going, going,—”
“A thousand!”
“Three cheers for Green-patch! Up and at him, Crutches!”
“Going,—going,—”
“Two thousand!”
And while the people cheered and shouted, “Crutches” muttered, “Who can this devil be, that is fighting so to get these useless books?—But no matter, he shan’t have them. The pride of Germany shall have his books if it beggars me to buy them for him.”
“Going, going, going,—”
“Three thousand!”
“Come, everybody—give a rouser for Green-patch!”
And while they did it, “Green-patch” muttered, “This cripple is plainly a lunatic; but the old scholar shall have his books, nevertheless, though my pocket sweat for it.”
“Going,—going,—”
“Four thousand!”
“Huzza!”
“Five thousand!”
“Huzza!”
“Six thousand!”
“Huzza!”
“Seven thousand!”
“Huzza!”
“Eight thousand!”
“We are saved, father! I told you the Holy Virgin would keep her word!” “Blessed be her sacred name!” said the old scholar, with emotion. The crowd roared, “Huzza, huzza, huzza,—at him again, Green-patch!”
“Going,—going,—”
“TEN thousand!” As Givenaught shouted this, his excitement was so great that he forgot himself and used his natural voice. His brother recognized it, and muttered, under cover of the storm of cheers,—
“Aha, you are there, are you, besotted old fool? Take the books, I know what you’ll do with them!”
So saying, he slipped out of the place and the auction was at an end. Givenaught shouldered his way to Hildegarde, whispered a word in her ear, and then he, also, vanished. The old scholar and his daughter embraced, and the former said, “Truly the Holy Mother has done more than she promised, child, for she has given you a splendid marriage portion,—think of it, two thousand pieces of gold!”
“And more still,” cried Hildegarde, “for she has given you back your books; the stranger whispered me that he would none of them,—‘the honored son of Germany must keep them,’ so he said. I would I might have asked his name and kissed his hand and begged his blessing; but he was Our Lady’s angel, and it is not meet that we of earth should venture speech with them that dwell above.”
F
GERMAN JOURNALS
The daily journals of Hamburg, Frankfort, Baden, Munich and Augsburg are all constructed on the same general plan. I speak of these because I am more familiar with them than with any other German papers. They contain no “editorials” whatever; no “personals,”—and this is rather a merit than a demerit, perhaps; no funny-paragraph column; no police court reports; no reports of proceedings of higher courts; no information about prize fights or other dog fights, horse races, walking-matches, yachting contests, rifle-matches, or other sporting matters of any sort; no reports of banquet-speeches; no department of curious odds and ends of floating fact and gossip; no “rumors” about anything or anybody; no prognostications or prophecies about anything or anybody; no lists of patents granted or sought, or any reference to such things; no abuse of public officials, big or little, or complaints against them, or praises of them; no religious column Saturdays, no rehash of cold sermons Mondays; no “weather indications;” no “local item” unveilings of what is happening in town,—nothing of a local nature, indeed, is mentioned, beyond the movements of some prince or the proposed meeting of some deliberative body.
After so formidable a list of what one can’t find in a German daily, the question may well be asked, What can be found in it? It is easily answered: A child’s handful of telegrams, mainly about European national and international political movements; letter-correspondence about the same things; market reports. There you have it. That is what a German daily is made of. A German daily is the slowest and saddest and dreariest of the inventions of man. Our own dailies infuriate the reader, pretty often; the German daily only stupefies him. Once a week the German daily of the highest class lightens up its heavy columns,—that is, it thinks it lightens them up,—with a profound, an abysmal, book criticism; a criticism which carries you down, down, down, into the scientific bowels of the subject,—for the German critic is nothing if not scientific,—and when you come up at last and scent the fresh air and see the bonny daylight once more, you resolve without a dissenting voice that a book-criticism is a mistaken way to lighten up a German daily. Sometimes, in place of the criticism, the first-class daily gives you what it thinks is a gay and chipper essay,—about ancient Grecian funeral customs, or the ancient Egyptian method of tarring a mummy, or the reasons for believing that some of the peoples who existed before the flood did not approve of cats. These are not unpleasant subjects; they are not uninteresting subjects; they are even exciting subjects,—until one of these massive scientists gets hold of them. He soon convinces you that even these matters can be handled in such a way as to make a person low-spirited.
As I have said, the average German daily is made up solely of correspondence, —a trifle of it by telegraph, the rest of it by mail. Every paragraph has the side-head, “London,” “Vienna,” or some other town, and a date. And always, before the name of the town, is placed a letter or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that the authorities can find him when they want to hang him. Stars, crosses, triangles, squares, half-moons, suns,—such are some of the signs used by correspondents.
Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly. For instance, my Heidelberg daily was always twenty-four hours old when it arrived at the hotel; but one of my Munich evening papers used to come a full twenty-four hours before it was due.
Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful of a continued story every day; it is strung across the bottom of the page, in the French fashion. By subscribing for the paper for five years I judge that a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.
If you ask a citizen of Munich which is the best Munich daily journal, he will always tell you that there is only one good Munich daily, and that it is publ
ished in Augsburg, forty or fifty miles away. It is like saying that the best daily paper in New York is published out in New Jersey somewhere. Yes, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung is “the best Munich paper,” and it is the one I had in my mind when I was describing a “first-class German daily” above. The entire paper, opened out, is not quite as large as a single page of the New York Herald. It is printed on both sides, of course; but in such large type that its entire contents could be put, in Herald type, upon a single page of the Herald, —and there would still be room enough on the page for the Zeitung’s “supplement” and some portion of the Zeitung’s next day’s contents.
Such is the first-class daily. The dailies actually printed in Munich are all called second-class by the public. If you ask which is the best of these second-class papers they say there is no difference, one is as good as another. I have preserved a copy of one of them; it is called the Münchener Tages-Anzeiger, and bears date January 25, 1879. Comparisons are odious, but they need not be malicious; and without any malice I wish to compare this journal, published in a German city of 170,000 inhabitants with journals of other countries. I know of no other way to enable the reader to “size” the thing.
A column of an average daily paper in America contains from 1800 to 2500 words; the reading matter in a single issue consists of from 25,000 to 50,000 words. The reading matter in my copy of the Munich journal consists of a total of 1,654 words,—for I counted them. That would be nearly a column of one of our dailies. A single issue of the bulkiest daily newspaper in the world,—the London Times,—often contains 100,000 words of reading matter. Considering that the Daily Anzeiger issues the usual 26 numbers per month, the reading matter in a single number of the London Times would keep it in “copy” two months and a half!
The Anzeiger is an eight-page paper; its page is one inch wider and one inch longer than a foolscap page; that is to say, the dimensions of its page are somewhere between those of a schoolboy’s slate and a lady’s pocket handkerchief. One-fourth of the first page is taken up with the heading of the journal; this gives it a rather top-heavy appearance; the rest of the first page is reading matter; all of the second page is reading matter; the other six pages are devoted to advertisements.
The reading matter is compressed into two hundred and five small pica lines, and is lighted up with eight pica head-lines. The bill of fare is as follows: First, under a pica head-line, to enforce attention and respect, is a four line sermon urging mankind to remember that although they are pilgrims here below, they are yet heirs of heaven; and that “When they depart from earth they soar to heaven.” Perhaps a four-line sermon in a Saturday paper is the sufficient German equivalent of the eight or ten columns of sermons which the New Yorkers get in their Monday morning papers. The latest news (two days old), follows the four-line sermon, under the pica head-line “Telegrams,”—these are “telegraphed” with a pair of scissors out of the Augsburger Zeitung of the day before. These telegrams consist of fourteen and two-thirds lines from Berlin, fifteen lines from Vienna, and two and five-eighths lines from Calcutta. Thirty-three small pica lines of telegraphic news in a daily journal in a King’s Capital of 170,000 inhabitants, is surely not an over-dose. Next, we have the pica heading, “News of the Day,” under which the following facts are set forth: Prince Leopald is going on a visit to Vienna, six lines; Prince Arnulph is coming back from Russia, two lines; the Landtag will meet at 10 o’clock in the morning and consider an election law, three lines and one word over; a city government item, five and one-half lines; prices of tickets to the proposed grand Charity Ball, twenty-three lines,—for this one item occupies almost one-fourth of the entire first page; there is to be a wonderful Wagner concert in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, with an orchestra of one hundred and eight instruments, seven and one-half lines. That concludes the first page. Eighty-five lines, altogether, on that page, including three head-lines. About fifty of those lines, as one perceives, deal with local matters; so the reporters are not over-worked.
Exactly one-half of the second page is occupied with an opera-criticism, fifty-three lines (three of them being head-lines), and “Death Notices,” ten lines.
The other half of the second page is made up of two paragraphs under the head of “Miscellaneous News.” One of these paragraphs tells about a quarrel between the Czar of Russia and his eldest son, twenty-one and a half lines; and the other tells about the atrocious destruction of a peasant child by its parents, forty lines, or one-fifth of the total of the reading matter contained in the paper.
Consider what a fifth part of the reading matter of an American daily paper issued in a city of 170,000 inhabitants amounts to! Think what a mass it is. Would any one suppose I could so snugly tuck away such a mass in a chapter of this book that it would be difficult to find it again if the reader lost his place? Surely not. I will translate that child-murder word for word, to give the reader a realizing sense of what a fifth part of the reading matter of a Munich daily actually is when it comes under measurement of the eye:
“From Oberkreuzberg, January 21, the Donan Zeitung receives a long account of a crime, which we shorten as follows: In Rametuach, a village near Eppenschlag, lived a young married couple with two children, one of which, a boy aged five, was born three years before the marriage. For this reason, and also because a relative at Iggensbach had bequeathed M400 ($100) to the boy, the heartless father considered him in the way; so the unnatural parents determined to sacrifice him in the cruelest possible manner. They proceeded to starve him slowly to death, meantime frightfully maltreating him,—as the village people now make known, when it is too late. The boy was shut up in a hole, and when people passed by he cried, and implored them to give him bread. His long-continued tortures and deprivations destroyed him at last, on the third of January. The sudden (sic) death of the child created suspicion, the more so as the body was immediately clothed and laid upon the bier. Therefore, the coroner gave notice, and an inquest was held on the 6th. What a pitiful spectacle was disclosed then! The body was a complete skeleton. The stomach and intestines were utterly empty, they contained nothing whatever. The flesh on the corpse was not as thick as the back of a knife, and incisions in it brought not a drop of blood. There was not a piece of sound skin the size of a dollar on the whole body; wounds, scars, bruises, discolored extravasated blood, everywhere,—even on the soles of the feet there were wounds. The cruel parents asserted that the boy had been so bad that they had been obliged to use severe punishments, and that he finally fell over a bench and broke his neck. However, they were arrested two weeks after the inquest and put in the prison at Deggendorf.”
Yes, they were arrested “two weeks after the inquest.” What a home-sound that has. That kind of police briskness rather more reminds me of my native land than German journalism does.
I think a German daily journal doesn’t do any good to speak of, but at the same time it doesn’t do any harm. That is a very large merit and should not be lightly weighed, nor lightly thought of.
The German humorous papers are beautifully printed, upon fine paper, and the illustrations are finely drawn, finely engraved, and are not vapidly funny, but deliciously so. So also, generally speaking, are the two or three terse sentences which accompany the pictures. I remember one of these pictures: a most dilapidated tramp is ruefully contemplating some coins which lie in his open palm; he says, “Well, begging is getting played out. Only about 5 marks ($1.25) for the whole day; many an official makes more!” And I call to mind a picture of a commercial traveler who is about to unroll his samples:
Merchant.—(pettishly) No, don’t. I don’t want to buy anything!
Drummer.—If you please, I was only going to show you—
Merchant.—But I don’t wish to see them!
Drummer.—(after a pause, pleadingly)—But do you mind letting me look at them?—I haven’t seen them for three weeks!
1 See Appendix A.
2 See Appendix B.
3 See Appendix C.
4 FR
OM MY DIARY.—Dined in a hotel a few miles up the Neckar, in a room whose walls were hung all over with framed portrait-groups of the Five Corps; some were recent, but many antedated photography, and were pictured in lithography—the dates ranged back to forty or fifty years ago. Nearly every individual wore the ribbon across his breast. In one portrait-group representing (as each of these pictures did) an entire Corps, I took pains to count the ribbons: there were twenty-seven members, and twenty-one of them wore that significant badge.
5 They have to borrow the arms because they could not get them elsewhere or otherwise. As I understand it, the public authorities, all over Germany, allow the five corps to keep swords, but do not allow them to use them. This law is rigid; it is only the execution of it that is lax.
6 See Appendix D for information concerning this fearful tongue.
7 I certainly thought them barefooted, but evidently the artist [of an illustration in the first edition] has had doubts.
8 The seeker after information is referred to Appendix E for our Captain’s legend of the “Swallow’s Nest” and “The Brothers.”
9 The Savior was represented as a lad of about 15 years of age. This figure had lost one eye.
10 When Baedeker’s guide books mention a thing and put two stars * * after it, it means “well worth visiting.” M. T.
11 I do not know that there have not been moments in the course of the present session when I should have been very glad to have accepted the proposal of my noble friend, and to have exchanged parts in some of our evenings of work.—[From a Speech of the English Chancellor of the Exchequer, August, 1879.]
12 Months after this was written, I happened into the National Gallery in London, and soon became so fascinated with the Turner pictures that I could hardly get away from the place. I went there often, afterward, meaning to see the rest of the gallery, but the Turner spell was too strong; it could not be shaken off. However, the Turners which attracted me most did not remind me of the Slave Ship.