CHAPTER XI.LEIBGEBER’S DISQUISITION ON FAME—FIRMIAN’S “EVENING PAPER.”In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until he has read the following letter of Leibgeber’s:—“Vaduz February 2, 1786.“My Firmian Stanislaus,“In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be there too. I have nothing else of any consequence to write to you now—however, this is quite important enough, namely, that Iorderyou to arrive in Bayreuth upon the first day of the month of gladness, because I have something of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind in my head concerning you, and that as sure as there is a heaven above us. My joy and your happiness depend on your making this journey. I would reveal the whole mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would fall into no hands but your own. Come! You might travel in company with a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of Rosa, who is coming to Bayreuth to fetch his bride home. But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler be that Meyern, of whom you have written to me, and if the said goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather than to warm) his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms (as in Spain they put serpents, something like him, round bottles to cool them), I shall take care, as soon as I get to Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of him, and shall maintain that he’s ten thousand times better than the Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal oftener during his career—two thousand two hundred and thirty-six times, to wit. I have the most anxious and heartfelt longing to behold the Heimlicher von Blaise; were he but a little nearer at hand I should—(seeing that there’s always something sticking in that throat of his which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an inheritance, or somebody else’s house and land),—I say, I should give him a good hard thwack every now and then in the small of his back (by way of a cure) and await the outcome—I mean, of the mouthful. I myself have been limping about the world in all directions, with my silhouette scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz at a studious, bibliothecarian Count’s, who really deserves that I should like him ten times better than I do. But, you see, my fondness foryouis fully as much as my heart can hold; and (to speak in general terms) the human race, and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing at, seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every day. Imustsay to you, ‘Famemay go to the devil!’ I think I shall decidedly dip down, disappear, and get out of the way altogether, almost immediately, run right into the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week under a new name, so that the fools shan’t know who I am. Ah! there were a few years, once on a time, when I reallydidwish to be something—if not a great author, at least a ninth elector—to be mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled—if not (now and then) to be a pro-rector, certainly (and very often) to be a dean. At that period of my life I should have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the most atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have been able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) an altar or temple in my own honour, higher than the pyramid mentioned by Ruysh in his ‘Cabinet of Natural Science’ as having been constructed of the forty-two gallstones of a certain noble lady. Siebenkæs, in those days I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used to have one of bees)—a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing else but to become famous thereby. ‘I quite admit’ (said I, at the period in question) ‘that it is not accorded to every son of earth (neither should he expect it), as it was to Saint Romuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch his holy body by way of a relic; but hemay, I think, without being unduly conceited, entertain a desire that a few hairs, if not of his fur-coat (as of Voltaire’s, in Paris), yet, at all events, of his head, may have the good luck to be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a certain opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)’“At the time in question I thought as above set forth, butnowmy views are far more enlightened. Fame is a thing altogether unworthy of fame. I was once sitting, on a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone, considering myself carefully, and I said, ‘Now,isthere really anything in the wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Haveyouany chance of becoming (like the deceased Cornelius Agrippa) Secretary of State for War to the Emperor Maximilian, and Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the Fifth? Will YOU ever hoist yourself up to the position of Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz, Physician in Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of Theology in Pavia? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine is as anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to Agrippa’s? And would it not be ludicrous ifyouwere to give out (and give yourself airs about it) that a Margrave in Italy, and the King of England, the Chancellor Mercurius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria), had all wished to have you in their service in the same year? Wouldn’t it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say nothing of the utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that all these people exploded into the sleeping-powder of death so many years beforeyouflashed up in the shape of the priming and detonating powder of life! In what well-known work (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius styleyouaportentosum ingenium? What author reckons you among theclarissima sui sæculi lumina? If it had been the case thatyoustood in extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops—with Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus—wouldn’t Schröckh and Schmidt have mentioned it,en passant, in their “History of the Reformation”? Even supposing that I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the same lot would be mine and his; we should both rot away in obscurity beneath the thicket, and it would be centuries before anybody came to lift the branches and take a look at us.’“It would do me no more good were I to go about the matter more knowingly, and have myself belauded in the ‘Universal German Library.’ I might stand for many a long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat in that chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the greatliteratilying and sitting round me on their beds of state—we might all (I say) wait begarlanded there, all alone together in that Temple of Fame of ours for many a long year before a single soul came and opened the door, and looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before me; and our triumphal car would be nothing but a wheelbarrow, on which our temple, with all its riches, should be whirled occasionally to a public auction. Yet I might, perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself immortal, could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality would reach the ears of any but those who are themselves as yet in this mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest gratification when I am compelled to perceive that it is exactly to all the most renowned and celebrated of people, over whose faces the laurel is growing, year by year, in their coffins (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), that I can never be anything but an unexplored Africa—particularly to Shem, Ham, and Japhet; to Absalom and his father; to both the Catos, the two Anthonys, Nebuchadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives; to the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as Taubmann and Eulenspiegel? When a Henry IV., and the four Evangelists, and Bayle (who knows all the rest of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who knows them better still), and Job, the bearer of sorrows—or, at all events, the author of Job—don’t know that there ever was such a thing as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth: when I am, and must ever remain, to a whole bye-gone world (i. e., six thousand years replete with great and grand men and nations), a mathematical point, an invisible eclipse, a wretchedje ne sais quoi, I really do not see how posterity (in which there mayn’t be so very much after all), or the next six thousand years, can do anything to speak of by way of compensation.“Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious heavenly hosts and archangels there are upon other world-balls, and on the little spheres in the milky way—that paternoster bead-chaplet of world-balls—seraphs, compared to whom I cannot be looked upon as anything but a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a considerable extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon earth the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog-soul into a cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a sheep, an ass—aye, or even an ape—and ultimately into a Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose nothing higher than that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins to cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection occurs to one. Among the various individuals which compose a species of animals (among whom theremustcertainly occur geniuses, good, sound, common-sense intelligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we remark and take notice only of the latter, or, at most, of the extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) is close enough to our retina to admit of our perceiving its delicate middle tints and gradations: and thus must it be withuswhen some spirit, sitting in heaven, looks at us in the mass. He is so far away, that he will find some trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper distinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses—the Kantists; between Goëthe and his imitators; and will see little or no difference between members of faculty and dunces, professors’ lecture-rooms and lunatic asylums; for little steps are wholly lost to the sight of one who is standing on the uppermost of them.“Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and courage; and, Siebenkæs, hang me if I ever sit down and grow one bit famous, or give myself the trouble either to build up or to pull down any learned or ingenious system whatever, or write anything at all of greater length than a letter.“Thy (not my) Self,“L.“P.S. I wish it would please God to grant me a second life after this, that I might have the opportunity of dealing with a fewrealitiesin the next world; for this one is really altogether too hollow and stupid; a wretched Nürnberg toy; nothing but the falling froth of a life; a jump through the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of Sodom, which, splutter as much as I will, I can’t get out of my mouth. Oh!—”To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufficiently serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it istooserious, and that it is only anoppressedheart which can jest in this fashion; that it is only an eye which is in much too feverish a condition—with the fireworks of life darting round it like the flying fire-flashes which precedeamaurosis—which is capable of seeing and picturing such fever-forms.Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all events. But I must go back to the 11th of February, in order to half-deprive the reader of his sympathising enjoyment of the re-union of the trefoil of friends which then took place. Lenette’s trembling petition that her husband would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Zichen’s earth-shaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and the ground she stood upon, were about to be let down; and it was at the near approach of death (whom she thought she already saw wagging his tiger’s tail) that she held out to her husband a hand of Christian peace. For (andto) that beautiful soul of his (disembodied) hers wept tears of love and of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, confused her happiness with her love—satisfaction with fidelity; and (it may be suspected) the eagerness with which she was looking forward to enwrapping the Schulrath, that very evening, in a warm and tender—gaze, found outward expression in the shape of an unusual degree of affection for her husband. It is here most essential that I should communicate to all and sundry persons one of the most valuable of all my maxims; in dealings with even the very best woman in the world, it is of the utmost importance that we should make excessively certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, what it is which she really wants (at the time being), and particularlywhom—(this is not always the person who is thus discriminating). There is in the female heart such a rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of emotions of every kind; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances to be nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she sheds a tear foryouout of her left eye, go on thinking, and drop another for your predecessor or successor (as the case may be) out of her right. Also a feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband’s share; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps more at what she thinks than at what she hears.’Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among us are stupid precisely on this point; that a woman thinking (as she does) more of other people’s feelings than of her own, is, in this matter, neither the deceiver nor the deceived; what she is is the deception itself—the optical deception and the acoustic.But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of this sort concerning elevenths of February until the twelfth. Wendeline was in love with the Schulrath; that was the fact of the matter. Like all women of any sense (in Kuhschnappel), she had believed in the superintendent-general, and in the kick he had administered to the earth, until Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced the idea of such a thing to be simplyimpious, when she abandoned the prophetic superintendent and gave in her adhesion to the incredulous worldling, Firmian. We all know that he had every bit as much of the masculine failing of overdoing consistency as she had of the feminine one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, therefore, in him to think that he was going to regain, by means of one grand effusion of the heart, an affection embittered by so many small effusions of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly enthusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of ill-will which has rooted itself all over a person’s heart with a thousand little spreading fibres. The affection which we have deprived ourselves of by means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling, is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of warming.In a word, it became evident in the course of a day or two that things were just as they had been three weeks before. Lenette’s love had flourished and grown to such an extent, by reason of Stiefel’s absence, that there was not room for it any longer under its bell-glass—it was shooting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open-air. TheAqua Toffanaof jealousy at last permeated every vessel in Firmian’s body, flowed into his heart, and gnawed it slowly in pieces. He was but the tree on which Lenette had inscribed her love for another, and was withering by reason of the incisions. Hehad sohoped that the Schulrath, recalled to them on Lenette’s birthday, would have healed all wounds, however deep; or at all events cicatrized them over: whereas, what he really had done was to open them all wider than ever—all unconscious as he was of it. Ah! what pain this was to the wretched husband! He grew poorer and weaker, and more miserable—both outwardly and inwardly—as the days went by, and gave up all hope of ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, March, and April passed over head—all heavy, dripping clouds, without a single break of blue sky or blink of evening-red.On the 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second time; and on the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, for ever, his ‘Evening Paper’ (this was the name he gave to his diary, because he wrote it of an evening), meaning to consignthat, along with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (as far as they were completed) into Leibgeber’s most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so soon to vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he thought, those hands would fainer clasp his soul (which was in the papers) than his poor meagre body—of which,du reste, Liebgeber always possessed a second unaltered edition (a perfectfacsimilecopy, so to speak) at all times at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation in here quoting, without emendation, the whole of this concluding page of the ‘Evening Paper’—Firmian’s ‘Swan Song,’ which—which went off by the following post.“Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the Court of Appeal of the second instance. The defendant’s counsel, and the Court, brought to bear upon me an old Statute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in Bayreuth, which enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not valid—depositions having to be made before the Court. These two hearings of my case render the uphill path to the third a little easier. For my poor Lenette’s sake I have appealed to the Lower House, my kind Stiefel advancing me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to the oracles of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as wasde rigueurin consulting the heathen oracles of old. I have reason to hope that I shall be able to effect my escape from the clutches of the knaves of the State;[58]or (shall I say), from these game-keepers and theircouteaux de chasse, and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I think I shall get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings, the toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament—not by my purse (which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect’s feeler, and could be drawn, like a leatherqueue, through the smallest mesh in any of their legal nets)—but with my body, which, as it approaches the topmost of their nets will be turned into dust of death, and will then fly free through and over every trap they can set.“I desire to lift my hand away from this, my evening paper, to-night for the last time, ere it becomes an absolute martyrology. If one could give away his life as a gift, I should be very happy to give mine to any dying person who would care to accept it. At the same time, let nobody suppose that because there chances to be a total eclipse of the sun above my head, I think, for a moment, that there must be one in America as well; or that I imagine the Gold Coast must be snowed up for the winter because a snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of my own nose. Life is warm and beautiful; even mine was so once. If it must be that I am to melt away, even before these snowflakes, I beg of my heirs, and of all Christian people, that they will not publish any part of my selection from the ‘Devil’s Papers,’ except that which I have copied out fair, which extends as far as the ‘Satire upon Women’ (inclusively). And as regards this diary of mine, in which one or two satirical fancies crop out here and there, I beg, also, that not a single one of these may be put into print.“Should any curious inquirer into the history of this day-and-night-book of mine be anxious to discover what the heavy weights, the nests, the clothes hung out to dry upon my branches, really consisted of, that they should so bend my top shoot and my branches down (and all the more curious to know it, inasmuch as I have written humorous satires)—(though, indeed, my sole object has been to nourish and support myself by help of these satire prickles of mine, absorbent vessels, to me, like those of the torch-thistle), I beg to inform him that he seeks to know more than I know myself, and more than I mean to tell. For man and the horseradish are most biting when grated; and the satirist is sadder than the jester, for the same reason that the Urang-Utang is more melancholy than the ape, namely, because he is nobler. If this paper does really reach your hands, my Henry, my beloved, and you wish to hear somewhat concerning the hail which has kept falling deeper and deeper upon my young seed-crop—count not the melted hailstones, but the broken stalks. I have nothing left to give me joy, save your affection—everything else is battered down into ruin. Since, for more reasons than one,[59]it is most unlikely that I shall ever come to you at Bayreuth, let us part, on this page, like spirits, giving each other hands of air. I detest the sentimental, but Fate has wellnigh grafted it on to me at last, in spite of myself, and I swallow great spoonsful of that satiric Glauber’s salt, which is generally so good a remedy for it—as sheep, who have caught the rot from feeding in damp meadows, are cured by licking salt. I say I swallow great spoonsful, about the size of my prizes at the bird-shooting, without the least perceptible effect. But, on the whole, it matters little. Fate, unlike our Sheriffs’ Courts, does not wait until we are well before she inflicts her sentence. My giddiness and other premonitory symptoms of apoplexy, give me to understand, with sufficient clearness, that I shall soon be subjected to a good Galenian blood-letting,[60]by way of remedy for the nose-bleedings of this life. I cannot say that I am particularly glad of it, or anxious for it. On the contrary, I am annoyed with people who demand that Fate shall at once unswaddle them (for we are swaddled in our bodies, the nerves and arteries being the swaddling-bands)—as a mother does her infant just because it cries, and has a little pain in its stomach. I should be glad to remain swaddled for a while to come among the rest of the ‘Children of the Rope,’[61]particularly as I cannot but fear that, in the next world, I shall be able to make little or no use of my satirical humour. However, I shall have to go. But when that comes to pass, I should like to ask you, Henry, to come some day to this town, and make them uncover your friend’s quiet face, which will scarce manage to put on the Hippocratic mien again. Then, my Henry, when you gaze long upon the grey, spotty, new moon-face there, and think that very little sunshine ever fell thereon—no sunshine of love, of fame, or fortune—you will not be able to look up to heaven, and cry out to God, ‘And now, at last, after all his sorrows and troubles, Thou, O God, hast annihilated him altogether; when he stretched his arms, in death, towards Thee, and that world of thine, Thou hast broken him in sunder as he lies there—poor soul!’ No, Henry, when I die,youwill be compelled to believe in Immortality.“Now that I have finished this ‘Evening Paper’ of mine, I am going to put out the light, for the full moon is shedding broad, imperial sheets of brightness into the room. Then, as there is no one else awake in the house, I will sit down in the twilight stillness, and, while I gaze at the moon’s white magic amid the black magic of night, and listen to great flocks of birds of passage as they come flying hither from warmer lands through the blue, clear moonlight—while I am passing away into a sister country—I will stretch my feelers out from my snail’s shell once more before the last frost closes it up for ever. Henry, I want to picture to myself to-night, clearly and brightly, all that is now over and past; the May of our friendship—every evening when we were too much moved by emotion and could not but fall into each other’s arms—my hopes, so old and grey now that I hardly know them to be mine—five old, but bright and happy, springs which I still remember—my dead mother, who, when she was dying, gave me a lemon, which she thought would be put into her coffin, and said, ‘Ah, I wish it were going into my bridal garland.’ And I will picture to myself, also, that moment, now so near, of myowndeath, when thy image will rise before the broken sight of my soul for the last time—when I shall part from thee, and, with a dark, inward pang, which can no more bring a tear into my cold and glazing eyes, sink away from thy shadowy form into the dark, and from amid the thick and heavy clouds of death, call to thee with a faint and hollow cry, ‘Henry, good-night! good-night! Ah, fare thee well! for I can say no more.’”End of the ‘Evening Paper.’
LEIBGEBER’S DISQUISITION ON FAME—FIRMIAN’S “EVENING PAPER.”
In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until he has read the following letter of Leibgeber’s:—
“Vaduz February 2, 1786.
“My Firmian Stanislaus,
“In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be there too. I have nothing else of any consequence to write to you now—however, this is quite important enough, namely, that Iorderyou to arrive in Bayreuth upon the first day of the month of gladness, because I have something of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind in my head concerning you, and that as sure as there is a heaven above us. My joy and your happiness depend on your making this journey. I would reveal the whole mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would fall into no hands but your own. Come! You might travel in company with a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of Rosa, who is coming to Bayreuth to fetch his bride home. But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler be that Meyern, of whom you have written to me, and if the said goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather than to warm) his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms (as in Spain they put serpents, something like him, round bottles to cool them), I shall take care, as soon as I get to Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of him, and shall maintain that he’s ten thousand times better than the Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal oftener during his career—two thousand two hundred and thirty-six times, to wit. I have the most anxious and heartfelt longing to behold the Heimlicher von Blaise; were he but a little nearer at hand I should—(seeing that there’s always something sticking in that throat of his which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an inheritance, or somebody else’s house and land),—I say, I should give him a good hard thwack every now and then in the small of his back (by way of a cure) and await the outcome—I mean, of the mouthful. I myself have been limping about the world in all directions, with my silhouette scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz at a studious, bibliothecarian Count’s, who really deserves that I should like him ten times better than I do. But, you see, my fondness foryouis fully as much as my heart can hold; and (to speak in general terms) the human race, and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing at, seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every day. Imustsay to you, ‘Famemay go to the devil!’ I think I shall decidedly dip down, disappear, and get out of the way altogether, almost immediately, run right into the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week under a new name, so that the fools shan’t know who I am. Ah! there were a few years, once on a time, when I reallydidwish to be something—if not a great author, at least a ninth elector—to be mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled—if not (now and then) to be a pro-rector, certainly (and very often) to be a dean. At that period of my life I should have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the most atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have been able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) an altar or temple in my own honour, higher than the pyramid mentioned by Ruysh in his ‘Cabinet of Natural Science’ as having been constructed of the forty-two gallstones of a certain noble lady. Siebenkæs, in those days I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used to have one of bees)—a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing else but to become famous thereby. ‘I quite admit’ (said I, at the period in question) ‘that it is not accorded to every son of earth (neither should he expect it), as it was to Saint Romuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch his holy body by way of a relic; but hemay, I think, without being unduly conceited, entertain a desire that a few hairs, if not of his fur-coat (as of Voltaire’s, in Paris), yet, at all events, of his head, may have the good luck to be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a certain opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)’
“At the time in question I thought as above set forth, butnowmy views are far more enlightened. Fame is a thing altogether unworthy of fame. I was once sitting, on a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone, considering myself carefully, and I said, ‘Now,isthere really anything in the wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Haveyouany chance of becoming (like the deceased Cornelius Agrippa) Secretary of State for War to the Emperor Maximilian, and Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the Fifth? Will YOU ever hoist yourself up to the position of Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz, Physician in Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of Theology in Pavia? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine is as anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to Agrippa’s? And would it not be ludicrous ifyouwere to give out (and give yourself airs about it) that a Margrave in Italy, and the King of England, the Chancellor Mercurius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria), had all wished to have you in their service in the same year? Wouldn’t it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say nothing of the utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that all these people exploded into the sleeping-powder of death so many years beforeyouflashed up in the shape of the priming and detonating powder of life! In what well-known work (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius styleyouaportentosum ingenium? What author reckons you among theclarissima sui sæculi lumina? If it had been the case thatyoustood in extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops—with Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus—wouldn’t Schröckh and Schmidt have mentioned it,en passant, in their “History of the Reformation”? Even supposing that I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the same lot would be mine and his; we should both rot away in obscurity beneath the thicket, and it would be centuries before anybody came to lift the branches and take a look at us.’
“It would do me no more good were I to go about the matter more knowingly, and have myself belauded in the ‘Universal German Library.’ I might stand for many a long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat in that chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the greatliteratilying and sitting round me on their beds of state—we might all (I say) wait begarlanded there, all alone together in that Temple of Fame of ours for many a long year before a single soul came and opened the door, and looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before me; and our triumphal car would be nothing but a wheelbarrow, on which our temple, with all its riches, should be whirled occasionally to a public auction. Yet I might, perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself immortal, could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality would reach the ears of any but those who are themselves as yet in this mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest gratification when I am compelled to perceive that it is exactly to all the most renowned and celebrated of people, over whose faces the laurel is growing, year by year, in their coffins (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), that I can never be anything but an unexplored Africa—particularly to Shem, Ham, and Japhet; to Absalom and his father; to both the Catos, the two Anthonys, Nebuchadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives; to the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as Taubmann and Eulenspiegel? When a Henry IV., and the four Evangelists, and Bayle (who knows all the rest of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who knows them better still), and Job, the bearer of sorrows—or, at all events, the author of Job—don’t know that there ever was such a thing as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth: when I am, and must ever remain, to a whole bye-gone world (i. e., six thousand years replete with great and grand men and nations), a mathematical point, an invisible eclipse, a wretchedje ne sais quoi, I really do not see how posterity (in which there mayn’t be so very much after all), or the next six thousand years, can do anything to speak of by way of compensation.
“Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious heavenly hosts and archangels there are upon other world-balls, and on the little spheres in the milky way—that paternoster bead-chaplet of world-balls—seraphs, compared to whom I cannot be looked upon as anything but a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a considerable extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon earth the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog-soul into a cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a sheep, an ass—aye, or even an ape—and ultimately into a Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose nothing higher than that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins to cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection occurs to one. Among the various individuals which compose a species of animals (among whom theremustcertainly occur geniuses, good, sound, common-sense intelligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we remark and take notice only of the latter, or, at most, of the extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) is close enough to our retina to admit of our perceiving its delicate middle tints and gradations: and thus must it be withuswhen some spirit, sitting in heaven, looks at us in the mass. He is so far away, that he will find some trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper distinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses—the Kantists; between Goëthe and his imitators; and will see little or no difference between members of faculty and dunces, professors’ lecture-rooms and lunatic asylums; for little steps are wholly lost to the sight of one who is standing on the uppermost of them.
“Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and courage; and, Siebenkæs, hang me if I ever sit down and grow one bit famous, or give myself the trouble either to build up or to pull down any learned or ingenious system whatever, or write anything at all of greater length than a letter.
“Thy (not my) Self,
“L.
“P.S. I wish it would please God to grant me a second life after this, that I might have the opportunity of dealing with a fewrealitiesin the next world; for this one is really altogether too hollow and stupid; a wretched Nürnberg toy; nothing but the falling froth of a life; a jump through the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of Sodom, which, splutter as much as I will, I can’t get out of my mouth. Oh!—”
To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufficiently serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it istooserious, and that it is only anoppressedheart which can jest in this fashion; that it is only an eye which is in much too feverish a condition—with the fireworks of life darting round it like the flying fire-flashes which precedeamaurosis—which is capable of seeing and picturing such fever-forms.
Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all events. But I must go back to the 11th of February, in order to half-deprive the reader of his sympathising enjoyment of the re-union of the trefoil of friends which then took place. Lenette’s trembling petition that her husband would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Zichen’s earth-shaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and the ground she stood upon, were about to be let down; and it was at the near approach of death (whom she thought she already saw wagging his tiger’s tail) that she held out to her husband a hand of Christian peace. For (andto) that beautiful soul of his (disembodied) hers wept tears of love and of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, confused her happiness with her love—satisfaction with fidelity; and (it may be suspected) the eagerness with which she was looking forward to enwrapping the Schulrath, that very evening, in a warm and tender—gaze, found outward expression in the shape of an unusual degree of affection for her husband. It is here most essential that I should communicate to all and sundry persons one of the most valuable of all my maxims; in dealings with even the very best woman in the world, it is of the utmost importance that we should make excessively certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, what it is which she really wants (at the time being), and particularlywhom—(this is not always the person who is thus discriminating). There is in the female heart such a rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of emotions of every kind; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances to be nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she sheds a tear foryouout of her left eye, go on thinking, and drop another for your predecessor or successor (as the case may be) out of her right. Also a feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband’s share; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps more at what she thinks than at what she hears.
’Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among us are stupid precisely on this point; that a woman thinking (as she does) more of other people’s feelings than of her own, is, in this matter, neither the deceiver nor the deceived; what she is is the deception itself—the optical deception and the acoustic.
But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of this sort concerning elevenths of February until the twelfth. Wendeline was in love with the Schulrath; that was the fact of the matter. Like all women of any sense (in Kuhschnappel), she had believed in the superintendent-general, and in the kick he had administered to the earth, until Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced the idea of such a thing to be simplyimpious, when she abandoned the prophetic superintendent and gave in her adhesion to the incredulous worldling, Firmian. We all know that he had every bit as much of the masculine failing of overdoing consistency as she had of the feminine one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, therefore, in him to think that he was going to regain, by means of one grand effusion of the heart, an affection embittered by so many small effusions of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly enthusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of ill-will which has rooted itself all over a person’s heart with a thousand little spreading fibres. The affection which we have deprived ourselves of by means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling, is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of warming.
In a word, it became evident in the course of a day or two that things were just as they had been three weeks before. Lenette’s love had flourished and grown to such an extent, by reason of Stiefel’s absence, that there was not room for it any longer under its bell-glass—it was shooting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open-air. TheAqua Toffanaof jealousy at last permeated every vessel in Firmian’s body, flowed into his heart, and gnawed it slowly in pieces. He was but the tree on which Lenette had inscribed her love for another, and was withering by reason of the incisions. Hehad sohoped that the Schulrath, recalled to them on Lenette’s birthday, would have healed all wounds, however deep; or at all events cicatrized them over: whereas, what he really had done was to open them all wider than ever—all unconscious as he was of it. Ah! what pain this was to the wretched husband! He grew poorer and weaker, and more miserable—both outwardly and inwardly—as the days went by, and gave up all hope of ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, March, and April passed over head—all heavy, dripping clouds, without a single break of blue sky or blink of evening-red.
On the 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second time; and on the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, for ever, his ‘Evening Paper’ (this was the name he gave to his diary, because he wrote it of an evening), meaning to consignthat, along with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (as far as they were completed) into Leibgeber’s most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so soon to vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he thought, those hands would fainer clasp his soul (which was in the papers) than his poor meagre body—of which,du reste, Liebgeber always possessed a second unaltered edition (a perfectfacsimilecopy, so to speak) at all times at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation in here quoting, without emendation, the whole of this concluding page of the ‘Evening Paper’—Firmian’s ‘Swan Song,’ which—which went off by the following post.
“Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the Court of Appeal of the second instance. The defendant’s counsel, and the Court, brought to bear upon me an old Statute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in Bayreuth, which enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not valid—depositions having to be made before the Court. These two hearings of my case render the uphill path to the third a little easier. For my poor Lenette’s sake I have appealed to the Lower House, my kind Stiefel advancing me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to the oracles of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as wasde rigueurin consulting the heathen oracles of old. I have reason to hope that I shall be able to effect my escape from the clutches of the knaves of the State;[58]or (shall I say), from these game-keepers and theircouteaux de chasse, and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I think I shall get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings, the toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament—not by my purse (which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect’s feeler, and could be drawn, like a leatherqueue, through the smallest mesh in any of their legal nets)—but with my body, which, as it approaches the topmost of their nets will be turned into dust of death, and will then fly free through and over every trap they can set.
“I desire to lift my hand away from this, my evening paper, to-night for the last time, ere it becomes an absolute martyrology. If one could give away his life as a gift, I should be very happy to give mine to any dying person who would care to accept it. At the same time, let nobody suppose that because there chances to be a total eclipse of the sun above my head, I think, for a moment, that there must be one in America as well; or that I imagine the Gold Coast must be snowed up for the winter because a snowflake or two happen to be falling in front of my own nose. Life is warm and beautiful; even mine was so once. If it must be that I am to melt away, even before these snowflakes, I beg of my heirs, and of all Christian people, that they will not publish any part of my selection from the ‘Devil’s Papers,’ except that which I have copied out fair, which extends as far as the ‘Satire upon Women’ (inclusively). And as regards this diary of mine, in which one or two satirical fancies crop out here and there, I beg, also, that not a single one of these may be put into print.
“Should any curious inquirer into the history of this day-and-night-book of mine be anxious to discover what the heavy weights, the nests, the clothes hung out to dry upon my branches, really consisted of, that they should so bend my top shoot and my branches down (and all the more curious to know it, inasmuch as I have written humorous satires)—(though, indeed, my sole object has been to nourish and support myself by help of these satire prickles of mine, absorbent vessels, to me, like those of the torch-thistle), I beg to inform him that he seeks to know more than I know myself, and more than I mean to tell. For man and the horseradish are most biting when grated; and the satirist is sadder than the jester, for the same reason that the Urang-Utang is more melancholy than the ape, namely, because he is nobler. If this paper does really reach your hands, my Henry, my beloved, and you wish to hear somewhat concerning the hail which has kept falling deeper and deeper upon my young seed-crop—count not the melted hailstones, but the broken stalks. I have nothing left to give me joy, save your affection—everything else is battered down into ruin. Since, for more reasons than one,[59]it is most unlikely that I shall ever come to you at Bayreuth, let us part, on this page, like spirits, giving each other hands of air. I detest the sentimental, but Fate has wellnigh grafted it on to me at last, in spite of myself, and I swallow great spoonsful of that satiric Glauber’s salt, which is generally so good a remedy for it—as sheep, who have caught the rot from feeding in damp meadows, are cured by licking salt. I say I swallow great spoonsful, about the size of my prizes at the bird-shooting, without the least perceptible effect. But, on the whole, it matters little. Fate, unlike our Sheriffs’ Courts, does not wait until we are well before she inflicts her sentence. My giddiness and other premonitory symptoms of apoplexy, give me to understand, with sufficient clearness, that I shall soon be subjected to a good Galenian blood-letting,[60]by way of remedy for the nose-bleedings of this life. I cannot say that I am particularly glad of it, or anxious for it. On the contrary, I am annoyed with people who demand that Fate shall at once unswaddle them (for we are swaddled in our bodies, the nerves and arteries being the swaddling-bands)—as a mother does her infant just because it cries, and has a little pain in its stomach. I should be glad to remain swaddled for a while to come among the rest of the ‘Children of the Rope,’[61]particularly as I cannot but fear that, in the next world, I shall be able to make little or no use of my satirical humour. However, I shall have to go. But when that comes to pass, I should like to ask you, Henry, to come some day to this town, and make them uncover your friend’s quiet face, which will scarce manage to put on the Hippocratic mien again. Then, my Henry, when you gaze long upon the grey, spotty, new moon-face there, and think that very little sunshine ever fell thereon—no sunshine of love, of fame, or fortune—you will not be able to look up to heaven, and cry out to God, ‘And now, at last, after all his sorrows and troubles, Thou, O God, hast annihilated him altogether; when he stretched his arms, in death, towards Thee, and that world of thine, Thou hast broken him in sunder as he lies there—poor soul!’ No, Henry, when I die,youwill be compelled to believe in Immortality.
“Now that I have finished this ‘Evening Paper’ of mine, I am going to put out the light, for the full moon is shedding broad, imperial sheets of brightness into the room. Then, as there is no one else awake in the house, I will sit down in the twilight stillness, and, while I gaze at the moon’s white magic amid the black magic of night, and listen to great flocks of birds of passage as they come flying hither from warmer lands through the blue, clear moonlight—while I am passing away into a sister country—I will stretch my feelers out from my snail’s shell once more before the last frost closes it up for ever. Henry, I want to picture to myself to-night, clearly and brightly, all that is now over and past; the May of our friendship—every evening when we were too much moved by emotion and could not but fall into each other’s arms—my hopes, so old and grey now that I hardly know them to be mine—five old, but bright and happy, springs which I still remember—my dead mother, who, when she was dying, gave me a lemon, which she thought would be put into her coffin, and said, ‘Ah, I wish it were going into my bridal garland.’ And I will picture to myself, also, that moment, now so near, of myowndeath, when thy image will rise before the broken sight of my soul for the last time—when I shall part from thee, and, with a dark, inward pang, which can no more bring a tear into my cold and glazing eyes, sink away from thy shadowy form into the dark, and from amid the thick and heavy clouds of death, call to thee with a faint and hollow cry, ‘Henry, good-night! good-night! Ah, fare thee well! for I can say no more.’”
End of the ‘Evening Paper.’