polished life, the delicate links of the educated
world, the graceful relation of the sexes, the forms contrived by wit
and good breeding, have been so often compared in contempt to the laws
and conditions of an ingenious game of cards, I have thought the simile
not unappropriate, but the contempt singular, and have been at a loss
to conceive that any one should have been blind to the variety of life
and its necessary forms. A man should only have lived for a time with
rustics, who so often want to pass off their rude bluntness for manly
virtue, who violate all decencies, who acknowledge no mystery, no
delicate relation, but nick-name every thing at all refined,
affectation and hypocrisy; a man should have been exposed for weeks
together to this rude pawing and grasping, and the oppressive weariness
it occasions, to value once more the dignity of a polished intellectual
intercourse. In that indeed a bare yea and nay will not always pass;
and to wish to overthrow, by what we call truth, the conventional
forms, by which alone this phenomenon admits of being exhibited, is
just as unreasonable as if I should call the laws which regulate a game
of chess a lie, move with my pawns into my antagonist's last row, and
declare my game won."

"You are a tolerable sophist," said the Baron. "All that is still
wanting is an encomium on the calumny and slander, the envy and
intrigue, of great societies; it would then only remain to throw
contempt upon the quiet virtue, the beautiful civic plainness, the
childlike innocence and noble simplicity of the unfashionable world."

"You cannot possibly have so misunderstood me," said the Count; "I only
mean that one ought not to confound the conditions which are requisite
to every game and every work of art (and good and polite society ought
certainly to partake of the nature of both) with untruths; for even in
dancing there is no truth, if the straight-forward bustling step of
business is to be called by that name, and even the promenade might
from this point of view be exposed to no inconsiderable conscientious
scruples."

"Worse and worse!" cried the Baron: "happily, my ingenious Count, you
are saying all this in company, on which you cannot produce a
pernicious impression."

"You have drawn me in for once," replied Brandenstein, "and so you may
hear my whole confession of faith. I believe there never was a man (and
there never will come one), who did not at some time or other in his
li