by Erckmann-Chatrian [Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian].
Originally published in Strange Stories (Contes Fantastiques). (D. Appleton & Co.; 1880).
Time past, I knew a good-natured druggist at Mentz, named Hans Schnapps. The door of his laboratory opened on the Thiermarkt; it was surmounted by a coat of arms in the place of a sign. Mercury's wand and the serpent of Æsculapius ornamented the panels. As for Hans, instead of remaining in his shop, he promenaded the streets with a big spy-glass under his arm, leaving the dispensing of his drugs to two young men, his clerks.
Hans was an original, and his appearance peculiar. His nose was long, his eyes were gray, and his lips always wore a half-sneering smile. From his broad-brimmed felt hat, his reddish drugget cloak, and his beard trimmed to a point, he might easily have been taken for a Flemish artist.
I used to meet him occasionally at the tavern of the "Tobacco Pot," when we would usually play a game of cards or dominoes, and talk of the times and the weather. Schnapps saw no necessity for telling me his business, and I saw no reason for telling him mine; in fact, we cared little what the other did or how he got a livelihood.
One day the burgomaster Zacharias said to me:
"Dr. Benedum, you are often seen with one Hans Schnapps."
"Yes, we meet occasionally; of late, quite frequently, in fact."
"Schnapps is a fool."
"Ah! I hadn't discovered it."
"Nothing more certain. Instead of attending to his business, he does nothing but walk the streets with a big spy-glass under his arm, wasting his time and losing his customers."
"That's possible; but it does not concern me."
"Very true. If he only were not married, and no one suffered by his neglect to look after his business but himself—"
"Ah, is he married?"
"His wife is the daughter of one of our most worthy citizens, a well-to-do cloth merchant."
"Good for Schnapps! His wife will have a little fortune, then, one of these days."
"Which he will squander."
"On spy-glasses?"
"No, with his foolish experiments. Do you know, Doctor, that when he is not out squandering away his time, he is in his basement making Heaven knows what? If you accidentally glance in at the window, you see his spy-glass leveled at you; Schnapps looks at you and bursts out laughing; and when the dinner hour comes his wife is obliged to call out three or four times, 'Hans! Hans! the soup is ready.'"
"Poor woman! she is much to be pitied."
The burgomaster, it was clear, half suspected that I was disposed to amuse myself at his expense; but he pretended not to notice it, and proposed that we should play for a pot of beer. I accepted, and we chatted of other things.
These revelations excited my curiosity. What in the world could Schnapps be at in his basement? What was the meaning of his having his spy-glass turned toward the window? Was it simply nonsense, or was it a serious experiment? These questions were continually in my mind, and I felt that I should have no peace until I satisfied my curiosity. I therefore went to the pharmacy the following morning, to see what I could discover. It was about nine o'clock. Frau Schnapps, a little, nervous, dull-eyed, badly dressed woman—one of those people who, without really uttering a complaint, find, means to proclaim their martyrdom—Frau Schnapps received me behind the counter.
"Good morning, madam," said I, bowing low, and raising my hat most deferentially. "Will you be so kind as to tell me where I can find Herr Schnapps?"
"In the basement," she replied, with a significant smile.
"Already?"
There was something in my "already" that seemed to amuse the little lady. She intimated that I should take the door to the left.
I hastened to feel my way through the passage and down the dark stairs, and, without meeting with any serious mishap, though I stumbled two or three times, soon found myself on the flagstones of the Schnapps laboratory.
It was spacious and perfectly dry. On looking around, I discovered that it was encumbered with gigantic spy-glasses, with mirrors of every conceivable size and shape, and lenses and prisms innumerable—in short, with all the paraphernalia of an optician.
Schnapps turned, quite surprised to see me enter.
"Ho!" said he, "it is my good friend Dr. Benedum. Glad to see you—very glad!"
He came toward me with open arms, but I stopped him with a tragic gesture, and cried:
"Stop! First know the object of my visit. I come, on behalf of our worthy burgomaster, to feel your pulse."
He reached out his arm, and I placed my fingers on the artery. After a moment's pause, I remarked, with becoming gravity:
"Hum! you are not so ill as they say."
"Eh—what! Ill—I?"
"No, you can not be said to really have a disease of the mind."
My reply made the druggist laugh so heartily that Fran Schnapps looked down from the top of the stairs to discover the cause of her husband's good humor.
"Sophia! Sophia!" cried Schnapps. "Ha, ha, ha! What do you think they say of me? Ha, ha, ha! They say I'm crazy!"
This burst was quite sufficient to satisfy Frau Schnapps's curiosity. With a sneer and a shrug, which might easily have been taken for an intimation that she thought people were not far in the wrong, she disappeared.
"Be seated, my dear Doctor," said Hans, having become comparatively calm; "be seated. Ha, ha, ha! I don't know when I've laughed so heartily. But tell me to what I am really indebted for the honor of your visit."
He brought forward an arm-chair for me, while he found a seat for himself on a low stool, where, with his grasshopper legs wide apart, and his elbows on his knees, as he sat stroking his pointed beard with his long, thin fingers, he presented a strangely unique appearance.
I told him of my conversation the day before with the burgomaster, and Schnapps, instead of being incensed, indulged in another hearty laugh.
"The ungrateful, burgomasterian donkey!" said he; "that's the way he speaks of me, is it? when I am expending my days and nights and the energies of my genius in his interest; when I have just invented a syringe for the special benefit of his class—a superb, a magnificent discovery, Doctor. Ha, ha, ha! Look at this glass. It is the famous Schnapps syringe—the only instrument of its kind that has ever been thought of, much less constructed. Till now we have only had the means of refreshing and purifying the abdominal viscera. Well, sir, I, with my syringe, propose to refresh and purify the brains of all the idiots, the imbeciles and fools, official and non-official, whom I can persuade to subject themselves to treatment. I pour into the cylinder of the instrument you have in your hand a decoction of Voltaire, of Shakespeare, of Father Malebranche, or of some one else, according to circumstances; I introduce the small end delicately into the eye; I push, and, crack! my subject is a poet, a metaphysician, or simply a man of common sense, according to the decoction used."
Here Schnapps indulged in such a series of contortions, threw himself about to such an extent, that I expected to see him fall from his stool; but, fortunately, he preserved his equilibrium.
"A very clever bit of pleasantry," said I.
"Pleasantry!" cried Schnapps; "pleasantry! Nothing of the sort. You have too much sense, my clear Doctor, not to know that our opinions depend upon our point of view. The poor wretch in his rags, without house or home, sees things in an entirely different light from that in which the nabob sees them. In his judgment, society is constituted on a false basis, and the laws are absurd."
"Without doubt, but—"
"But," interrupted Schnapps, "seat the fellow at a well-supplied table, in a spacious mansion, surrounded by handsome grounds, and peopled with pretty women; feed him on carefully prepared dishes, quench his thirst with Johannisberg, and place behind his chair a half dozen lackeys, who address him as 'Sir,' or 'My Lord,' or 'Your Grace,' or what you will; and you will find that his notion of things will undergo as great a change as his condition has done. Then, in his judgment, everything will be quite as it should be; then, according to him, our social demarkations are the outcome of perfectly natural causes; then our laws appear to him as the master products of the human mind."
"Very true, my dear Schnapps—very true. What you say is the burden of one of the most familiar chapters in the history of humanity. We see the things of this world through a convex or a concave glass, according to the position in which we are placed. But I fail, as yet, to see your drift."
"Oh," cried Schnapps, "what I am driving at is very simple. Since everything depends upon our point of view, it is clear that happiness will be assured by our being able to see the things of this world in their most favorable light; and it is precisely herein that consists:the inestimable merit of my discovery. You shall judge for yourself. Here, look into the instrument you have in your hand."
I did as he bade me, and could not withhold a cry of amazement and admiration. I saw myself president of the Society of Scientists of Berlin, tall and commanding in figure, and decorated with the Orders of Merit, of the Black Eagle, of the Brown Eagle, of the Red Eagle, of the Garter, and I don't know what all. I held the gavel, and called the members to order. Through the windows of the amphitheatre I saw my carriage and horses, and my lackeys in their rich liveries. Farther on I saw my wife, beautiful as the day, walking alone and pensive under the limes; and I said to myself:
"Benedum! Benedum! fortunate Benedum! what a sublime genius, what a great man thou art!"
An outburst of ironic laughter aroused me from this profound contemplation. I removed the apparatus from before my eyes, and saw myself again in the basement, standing before the apothecary, who looked at me with a peculiar expression that seemed to me little short of malicious.
"Eh, well," said he; "what do you say to that?"
"My dear Schnapps," I cried, "you must let me have this glass."
"What! let you have it!" said he. "Do you know that this little thing cost me ten years of hard work and study; that with it I, in some sort, am the possessor of the universe; that I see my wife always young, pretty, and fascinating; that I am always cheerful and content; that with it I do not envy the proudest monarchs of the earth; that it renders me as rich as Crœsus and more powerful than Xerxes, and that I would not part with it for anything the world has to offer? Nor is that all: with this little instrument I can give to myself clysters of metaphysics, of poesy, or of common sense, according to my desires and needs."
"But tell me, I beg of you," I cried, "how you chanced to make this sublime discovery."
"It is not so marvelous as you seem to think it," said he, laughing. "It is simply a kaleidoscope, but a kaleidoscope of a new kind. Instead of letting its flowers and pieces of colored glass fall where accident takes them, it places them in a certain natural, sequent order. In other words, you see here a union of the daguerreotype and the telescope, two instruments that the Creator has united in the head of man."
Here Schnapps brought from the depth of one of his pockets a shell snuff-box. After slowly inhaling a pinch of its contents, seemingly to assist him in collecting and arranging his thoughts, he continued:
"Three years ago I endeavored to fix the solar spectrum on a copper plate. To this end I employed all the chemical combinations imaginable, without obtaining any satisfactory result. One day, with my plate coated with a more sensitive composition than any I had thus far used, I seemed to fix the red, orange, and violet rays; the plate assumed something of the colors of the rainbow. I was, as you can readily conceive, delighted, thinking that at last I was on the road to success, when my wife, in accordance with her immemorial custom, began to cry out:
"'Hans, the soup is getting cold! Hans, the soup is getting cold! Hans, Hans, Hans, Hans, Hans, Hans! the soup is getting cold!—the soup is getting cold!'
"Such cries the devil himself could not withstand. I was compelled, whether I would or not, to interrupt my experiments. I placed my copper plate on the projection of the wall you see there, which usually serves as a place to put my candle, and went quietly up and seated myself at the table."
"And what did you say to your wife?"
"Nothing."
"In your place, I should have wrung her neck."
Schnapps smiled incredulously.
"That night," he continued, "after supper, I came down here, as I was in the habit of doing. Fatigue and the annoyances I had had during the day prevented my returning to my work. I sat down in this arm-chair, and soon fell asleep. When I awoke, about one o'clock in the morning, I found that my candle had burned out; but the light from a star entered at this little window, and, striking the plate, was reflected directly toward me. With my eyes involuntarily fixed on this luminous point, I got to thinking of my wife; of some of her disagreeable ways, and that I should be justified in endeavoring to correct them; and, in short, of the thousand little annoyances that I find myself daily subjected to. Finally, tired of these reflections, I fell asleep again. The next morning all was forgotten, when, glancing at the plate, I saw—what think you?—my dream of the night imprinted on it with striking fidelity: my wife, the dining-room, the clock on the mantel, the windows in the rear, the little yard beyond—in fact, everything in the room and connected with it, to the smallest details.
"You can imagine my surprise and delight. It was then that I conceived the idea of my kaleidoscope. I saw that the human brain, like the eye of the fly, is an optical instrument with innumerable facets; that its products are delivered by refraction, and may be gathered on a chemical substance, the composition of which I had just discovered.
"Thus, my dear Doctor, all your thoughts and desires, in this instrument, are materialized; with its aid, you can convey your wishes and conceptions more rapidly and more perfectly than language could possibly convey them."
This discovery seemed to me truly miraculous.
"My dear Schnapps, you're a wonderful man!" I cried. "Allow me to embrace you. You are greater than the Pyramid of Cheops; you will have a place in the eternal temple of fame, where you will shine like a star of the first magnitude. But I beg that you will enlighten me on this point: how can you administer clysters compounded of philosophy, science, poesy, or reason? This appears to me to be even more wonderful than the materialization of thought."
"First, let me call your attention to certain general considerations of paramount interest," said Schnapps, visibly flattered by my enthusiasm. "You must have remarked that the great philosophers, the great mathematicians, the great poets, and, in general, the great idealogues, end their days in misery. Abused and scoffed at during their lives, and sometimes even hunted down like wild beasts, they become after their death the prey of a certain class of individuals known as practical men. Much has been said and written, time out of mind, against this exploitation of genius by mediocrity, but that has not prevented the practice from being as common now as it was in the days of Homer, of Pythagoras, of Socrates, and of so many other celebrated idealogues. They are persecuted and killed, in order that reputations may be made and money coined out of their discoveries. That all this is wrong, quite other than it should be, is obvious; but at the bottom nothing is more simple, and, I will venture to add, more natural. In order that an idea may succeed in this world, it is necessary that it have the support of the masses. But the masses, who would not be able to rise to the level of the idea pure and simple, comprehend it easily and perfectly when it is materialized—that is, they comprehend the fact. The supposed superiority of your practical men over your idealogues is due to their greater skill in effecting this materialization. These fellows are rich and powerful; they govern the world; it is to them that monuments are erected. Why? Because they place within the comprehension of the idiots and imbeciles the ideas of some poor devil of a truly great man, who died of hunger in a garret. Am I right, or am I not?"
"You are right, quite right, Herr Schnapps."
"Very well," resumed Schnapps, with an ironical smile, "my kaleidoscope suppresses all this practical presumption, and places genuine merit where it rightfully belongs. It materializes ideas, and places them within easy reach of the masses. Suppose, for example, I want to add to my knowledge of metaphysics. I place my eye at the small end here, and you read to me Kant. As his reasoning enters my brain, passes through it and out at my eye, it is imprinted indelibly on this plate; it then becomes materialized, becomes tangible, becomes something that my senses can take cognizance of, and, consequently, something that I can comprehend and appreciate."
While Schnapps explained this grand mystery to me, an irresistible desire to have his kaleidoscope took possession of me.
"My dear Schnapps," said I, "I trust you will make a number of these instruments. Such a discovery belongs to humanity."
"Humanity be hanged!" cried Schnapps. "I should like to know what humanity has ever done for me. It treats me as though I were a fool, a madman; it binds me to a woman whom I dislike, and it would let me die of hunger, like all the other great discoverers, if I had not my drug-shop to fall back on."
"But you will rise in public consideration; you will secure universal esteem and admiration."
"Eh! what do I want of the admiration of a crowd of dunderheads?" cried Schnapps. "Take from them the discoveries of Gutenberg, of Galileo, of Newton, of Volta, of Daguerre, and of Hans Schnapps, and you will have only a troupe of asses kneeling before a saber. The admiration of people of that sort! No, thank you. Let humanity make its own kaleidoscopes; as for me, I shall hold on to mine, and I shall use it for my own edification and advantage."
This exhibition of egotism exasperated me.
"But, my dear Schnapps," said I, controlling my anger, "allow me to observe that your reasoning is absurd. True, you make sublime kaleidoscopes; but others cultivate the ground, sow, reap, have their corn ground for you, and even bring you the bread ready made; others erect pharmacies; others make your clothes and shoes; others procure wine, beer, and tobacco for you—things you can not well do without. We are all dependent the one upon the other, my dear Schnapps, and when—"
While I was, as I thought, making myself most eloquent after this fashion, the apothecary leveled his wonderful glass at me.
"Ah, ha!" he suddenly cried, interrupting me, "I see what you are after. Devilish little do you care for humanity. You want my glass, but you'll not get it. Ha, ha, ha!"
And he hastened to reduce it to its smallest compass, and put it into a box, of which he turned the key. Then, turning to me with a triumphant air, he continued:
"You'll not stick your nose near it again. Let that be a lesson to you—let it teach you not to play the hypocrite, and preach philanthropy in your own individual interest. I see you, like a good many more I have met, are an oily fellow, Dr. Benedum. You a philanthropist! you preach duty to me! I don't like such people as you are, sir, and you can in no way oblige me so much as by retracing the steps that brought you here."
My face had crimsoned to the very roots of my hair. I felt a strong desire to give Schnapps a drubbing then and there; but I suddenly remembered that his two apprentices were a couple of brawny fellows, either of whom would be a match for me, and prudently retired.
Soon afterward I left Mentz, to establish myself at Nuremberg, and it is now nearly two years since Schnapps and I last met. It seems, however, that he continues to promenade the streets in his red drugget cloak, with what is generally supposed to be a spy-glass under his arm. At least, that is what the burgomaster. Zacharias writes me.
What a pity that such a valuable secret should be in the hands of such a crazy idiot!
It is a singular fact that men of common sense have never invented anything; it is the fools who, till now, have made all the great discoveries.