I had planned for to-day to play the joke of calling my biography a printed New Year's Wish to the reader, and then, instead of wishes, send out in sport New Year's curses and more of the like. But I cannot do it, and on the whole shall soon be absolutely unable to do it any more. What a heavy, burnt-out heart must those people have, who in the face of the first day which ushers them into the procession of 364 other lowly, serious, wailing and weeping ones, can prefer the noisy, riotous pleasure of beasts to the still, tender and almost tearful joy of man! You cannot know what the wordsfirstandlastsay, if in their presence, whether they refer to a day, a book, or a person, you do not draw a deeper breath; still less can you know what preëminence man has over the beast, if within you the interval is so great between joy and longing, and if both are not within you blended in one tear! Thou Heaven and thou Earth, your present form is an image (as if a mother) of such a union; that world of light looking so consolingly into our freezing eyes--the Sun,--transforms the blue ether around it into a blue night, which casts a still deeper shadow of itself over the glittering sun-face of the snow-clad earth, and man sees with yearning eyes a night sweep across his heaven and one fissure of light, the deep opening and street stretching away toward brighter worlds....
The past night still leads my pen. It is, namely, in Auenthal, as in many other places, the custom, that in the last solemn night of the year there shall be sounded out from the mouths of bugles, as it were an echo of days that have departed, or a funeral music of the buried year. When I heard my good Wutz with some assistants in the room below me making some stir and a few experimental tones, I arose and went with my sister, who had been long awake, to the narrow window. In the still night one could hear the steps of the people going up. Above our window lay that beam under which one must listen and look out in prophetic night, in order to see and hear the cloudy forms of futurity. And in fact I saw, in a literal sense, what superstition is fain to see. I saw, as it does, coffins on roofs, and funeral trains at one door and wedding-guests and bridal wreath at another, and a human year passed through the village and held on its right maternal breast the little joys which play with man, and on its left the sorrows which bark at him; fain would it nourish both, but they fell off dying, and as often as a sorrow or a joy withered and dropped, so often did one of the two clappers strike its signal on the bells of the steeple.... I looked over toward the white wood behind which lay the dwellings of my friends, O young year, I said, repair to my friends and lay in their arms the joys thou hast in thine, and take with thee the lingering and tenacious sorrows of the old year, which will not die! Go into all the four quarters of the world and distribute the sucklings of thy right breast, and leave me only one--health!
The tones of the steeple welled out into the far moonless night, which was a great summit sprinkled over with starry blossoms. Art thou happy or unhappy, little Schoolmaster Wutz, that thou standest on thy tower opposite the White Wall and a white stone of the Auenthal churchyard and yet thinkest not whom wall and stone enclose, the same namely, who once, in thy place, in just so still a night greeted like thee the new year: thy father, who in his turn, just as calmly as thou blew his bugle-blast out over the deaf and dead ears of his mouldering kinsfolk?... More tranquil, indeed, art thou, that on this New Year's eve thinkest on no other diminution than that of the nights; but dearer to me is my Philippina, who here beside me lives her life over anew and sure more seriously than the first time, and in whose bosom the heart is not merely doing lady's work, but sometimes also rises on the swell of emotion to feel howlittleman is, howmuchhe comes to be, and how truly the earth is a church-yard wall and man the detonizing saltpetre which crystallizes upon it! Good, weeping sister, at this moment thy brother cares not that thou to-morrow--wilt care very little about this; at this moment he pardons it in thee and in thy whole sex, that your hearts so often resemble precious stones, in which the fairest colors are often found side by side with--a fly or a bit of moss; for what can man, as he surveys and sighs over this wasting life and its decaying possessions--what can he do better in the midst of this feeling than love them right heartily, and cherish a true patience with them, a true.... Let me embrace thee, Philippina, and if I should ever fail to forgive thee, remind me of this embrace!...
My biography should now move on again; but I cannot possibly lend my head and my hand to the work, unless I would on the spot write myself out of the learned world into the world to come. It is better for me to make myself merely the compositor of this history and copy off the painful letter which Gustavus sent to his forfeited friend.
* * * * *
"Faithful, virtuous soul! Let the present dark moment, which I only have deserved, but not thou, not torment thee long, but soon be veiled from sight! O! fortunate, indeed, it is, that thou canst not see my eye, nor my lips quivering with anguish, nor my shattered heart, wherewith I now make an end to all my fair days. If thou shouldst see me here as I sit writing, then would the tenderest soul that ever administered solace on the earth, place itself between me and my heaving sorrow and seek to cover and comfort me; she would cast upon me a healing look and ask what ailed me.... Ah, good, true heart! ask it not of me; I should have to answer: my anguish, my deathless rack, my viper-wound is lost innocence.... Theefn wouldthyeternal innocence turn away affrighted and give me no consolation; I should be left lying alone, and the sorrow would stand erect beside me with the scourge in its hand. Ah! I could not once raise my head, to cast a forlorn look back upon all the good hours which had departed from me in thy person.--Ah, it is indeed so, and thou art already gone!--Amandus! does heaven cut me off entirely from thee, and canst thou, who gavest me the lily-hand of Beata, not see my polluted one, which belongs no more to that purest?--All, hadst thou been still living, then should I, indeed, have lost thee also.... O, that there can be hours here below, which are suffered to bear the full beaker of a whole life's joy, and with one fall to shatter it to pieces and spill the refreshing draught of all, all years!
"Beata! now we part; thou deservest a more faithful heart than mine has been; I deserved not thine--I have nothing left that thou couldst love--my image in thy heart must be broken in pieces--thine abides forever immovable in my own; but it looks upon me no longer with the eye of love, but with a downcast eye that weeps over the place where it resides.... Ah, Beata, I can hardly end my letter; so soon as its last line is written, we are torn from one another, and never more hear or know each other.--Oh, God! how little avail penitence and tears! No one restores the hot heart of man, when there is nothing left therein, save the great, hard sorrow, which it strives, as a volcano laboring with a mass of rock, to cast up and out of itself, and which forever plunges back again into the blazing kettle; nothing can heal us, nothing can give back again to leafless man his fallen foliage; Ottomar, after all, is right in saying that the life of man passes, like a full moon, over nothing but nights....
"Ah well, it must needs be! Farewell, friend! Gustavus was not worthy of the hour which thou wilt have. Thy holy heart, which he has wounded, may an angel bind up, and bear thou it silently in the bond of friendship! My last, joyful letter, wherein I could not content myself with my overflowing happiness, lay in this inconsolable one, in which I have nothing more left me, and burn them both together. Let no officious person tell thee in future after many years, that I am still living, that I have pressed the long grief, with which I expiate my sunken happiness, like thorns into my forlorn bosom, and that in my sad day of life the night comes the sooner which lies between two worlds! When one day thy brother falls with a fairer heart upon thy breast, tell him not, tell it not to thyself, who looked like him--and when one day thy tearful eye rests upon the white pyramid, turn it away and forget that I was there so happy. Ah! but I forget not, I turn not my eyes away, and if man could die of remembrance, I would go to the grave of Amandus and die--Beata, Beata, in no human breast wilt thou find stronger love than mine was, though thou easily mayest stronger virtue--but when thou hast one day found that virtue, then remember not me, not my fall, repent not our short love, nor do him wrong who once under the starry heaven reclined upon thy noble breast.... O, thou my, my Beata! at thepresent instantthou dost indeed still belong to me, because thou dost not yet know me; at the present moment my spirit may, with its hand upon its wounds and stains come before thine and fall upon it and say to thee with stifled sighs: love me!...Afterthis moment, no more.--After this moment I amalone, without love and without solace--a long life stretches away before me far and void, and there is no Thou in it----but this human life and its errors will pass away. Death will give me his hand and lead me away--the days beyond the earth will purify me for virtue and thee----then come, Beata, then, when an angel shall have borne thee through thy earthly evening twilight into the second world, then at last will a heart, broken here below, but healed up yonder, meet thine and sink on thy bosom and yet not die with rapture, and I shall say once more: 'Take me again, beloved soul, I, too, am blessed!'--all earthly wounds will vanish, the circle of Eternity will embrace and bind us together!... Ah, we must indeed first part, and this life still continues--live longer than I, weep less than I, and--yet do not wholly forget me.--Ah, hast thou, then, loved me very much, thou precious one, thou whom I have trifled away?...
"Gustavus F."
At evening while he was in the act of sealing the letter, Beata passed in at the palace-gate. As he saw her bright form, which was so soon to be bathed in such a flood of tears, alight from the carriage, he started back, wrote the address, went to bed and drew the curtains, and softly----wept. Particularly eager was he to be out of the way of the romance-builder and stone-mason, Oefel, because his looks and tones were nothing but ignoble triumphs of his prophetic glance; and even Gustavus's dejection be still more ignobly counted among his own triumphs....
Actually, I would the Devil had all the four quarters of the world and would take them off and himself, too; for he has half got me. Few know that he will not let me bring this biography to an end. I am now convinced that I shall not die of apoplexy (as I lately fancied under my frozen head-piece) nor of consumption (which was a true maggot of the brain); but insure me against this, that I shall not be wrecked upon apolypus of the heart, to which all human probability points?--Happily I am not so obstinate as Musaeus in Weimar, who did not believe in the existence of his, which he fed and fostered as I do mine, with cold coffee, until the polypus choked his noble heart and cheated him of all his birthday festivals and all his wishes for those of his spouse. I say, I note more wisely the forerunners of polypus in the heart; I do not conceal from myself what lies hid behind a remittent pulse, namely, this very heart-polypus, the slow-match of death. The cursed literary secret tribunal, the reviewing-guild, creeps with its nooses round us good, easy simpletons, who keep on writing, and like butterflies die in the embrace of the Muses--but not a penny-piece, not a line, should we publish for such conscienceless birds of prey; what thanks do I get for setting up scenes which almost kill the scene-painter, and for writing biographical sketches which operate upon me not much better than poisoned letters? Who knows--for I seldom come to Scheerau now-a-days--who knows, except my sister, that in this biographical summer-house, which will be my mausoleum, I often paint over chambers and walls, which stop my pulse and breath to such an extent, that some day I must be found lying dead beside my work? Must I not, when I thus come within the electric range of death, jump up, circulate through my chamber, and in the midst of the tenderest or sublimest passages break off and black the boots on my feet or brush my hat and breeches, merely that it may not take my breath away, and yet go at it again, and in this cursed style alternate between emotion and boot-blacking?--A curse upon you critics in a body!
To this are added also a thousand pieces of drudgery which for some time have been pestering me all the oftener, because they somehow perceive that the polypus will soon give me the finishing stroke, and they will not much longer have any chance with me. My Maussenbach lobster, who is continually taking me between his legal shears and who thinks a poor justice has no right to die of anything else than labors,exofficio,--this Egyptian task-master I will pass over; my sister and Wutz, also, beneath me, both of whom are merry beyond all reason or measure, and sing me almost to death. But what oppresses me, is the oppressor of his subjects, the metallic press-work which they call our Prince.
I came near, lately, writing myself, in a paper of exceptions, into an honorable arrest. But here on the biographic paper I can even throw my oranges at the crowned head without danger of imprisonment. Fie! is it for this thou art Prince, that thou mayst be a waterspout, which sucks up everything over which it passes into its crater? And if thou wilt some time rob us, do it with no other hands than thine own, drive round begging through the country from house to house and raise thyself the regular taxes into thy carriage; but just as it has always been, our payments, after the transit-toll which they must give into the hands of all thy revenue-officers, arrive at last lean as far-traveled herrings at thy coffers, so that in fact thou dost get no more out of the heavy sums than convenientlogarithms. Princes, like the East Indian crabs, haveonegigantic pair of shears for seizing, and one dwarf-pair for carrying the prey to the mouth.
And so is it with the whole metropolis, where everyone regards himself as fellow-regent, and yet every one cries out at others meddling with the administration, and that children creep under the ermine as under the paternal dressing-gown and jointly act the father--where the palaces of the great are built oflapis infernalis[lunar caustic], and like leprous houses eat out smaller ones--where the Minister bears the Prince on his unfelt hand as the falconer does the falcon on his gloved one--where one regards the vices of the people as the revels of their superiors, and merely coat over with wax all moral carrion as the bees do their material, instead of carrying it out of the hive,i. e. where the police proposes to take the place of morals--where, as at every court, amoralfigure is found to be as intolerable and stiff as ageometricone is in painting--where the devil is fully loose and the holy spirit is in the wilderness, and where people who, in Auenthal or elsewhere, hold crooked probes in their hand, whereby they would fain draw out foreign bodies and splinters from the wounds of the State, are told to their faces, they are not quite in their right minds....
I would it were true, then I should at least be perfectly sound. After such clump of personalities which, like so many monads, make up a body politic, mine is too puny to be taken out and looked at. Else I could now, after my anxieties about the State, enumerate those relating to myself.
And yet I will communicate to the reader my agonies or seven words on the cross, although to the very cross under which he will pity me, he himself has helped nail me. In fact no devil concerns himself much about my sickness. I sit here and represent to myself, out of unrequited love to the reader, all day long, that fire may be cried, which, like an author's stove, shall lay all my biographic paper in ashes and perhaps the author too. I further torment myself with imagining that this book may in the mail-coach or in the printing-office be so spoiled, that the public shall be as good as cheated out of the whole work, and that even after the printing it may find its way into a baiting-house and torture-chamber, where a critical provider and general of the reviewing order has his reviewer sitting with their long teeth, to tear off from my tender Beata and her lover clothes and flesh, and whose room is like that room full of spiders which a certain Parisian kept, and which at his entrance always darted down from the ceiling to suck the bleeding doves' feathers which he had pulled out, and from whose operations he with great pains managed to obtain yearly a silk stocking.... All these torments I put upon myself, merely on the reader's account, who would be the greatest loser if he did not have me to read; but it is all one to this hard man, what they have to undergo who minister to his gratification. When at last I have freed my hands from these nails of the cross, still life itself wearies me as such a miserable tedious monochord of a thing that it must distress every one who reckons up how often he has to draw breath and heave his breast up and down until it stiffens, or how often before his death he will be obliged to lift himself up on his boot-jack or stand before his shaving-glass. I often contemplate the greatest misery in a whole life, namely, that which results if one had to dispatch all the shavings, frizzlings, dressings,sedesin succession, which are now scattered through a life-time. The gloomiest night-thought which broods over my still somewhat blooming prospect, is this, that death may in this nocturnal life, where existence and friends move like widely sundered lights in the dark mine, snatch my precious loved ones out of my powerless hands and lock them up forever in close coffins, to which no mortal, but only the greatest and most invisible hand, has the key.... For hast thou not torn so much from me already? Would I speak of sorrow or of the vanity of life, if the gay youthful circle were not yet broken in pieces, if the colored band of friendship, which still fastens the earth and its enamel to man, had not yet been sawed asunder to within one or two threads? O thou whom I even now hear weeping from a far distance, thou art not unhappy on whose breast a beloved heart has grown cold, but thou art so who thinkest of the corrupting element, when thou wouldst rejoice in the love of the living friend, and who in the most blissful embrace askest thyself: "How long shall we continue to feel each other?"
Now at last the case has become desperate; my disease has taken at once the biographical and the legal pen out of my hand, and despite all Easter Fair's and Fatalia, it is impossible for me to put pen to paper on any subject....
An attack of amaurosis, to all appearances, in addition to my other maladies, is threatening me; for sparks, and specks, and spider-webs dance for hours about my eyes; and these (according to Plempins and Chevalier Zimmerman) are premonitory symptoms of the said disease. Squinting (says Richter, the cataract-operator, not the patient--in his Surgical Science. B. III p. 426) is an unmistakable forerunner of amaurosis. How very much I squint, every one can see, because I always look and aim at everything to the right and left at once. Now when I actually become as stone-blind as a mole, then it is all up with my bit of biographical writing....
I have a couple of fevers at once, which with other more fortunate persons cannot generally bear each other's company. The three-days' fever, the quartan-fever, and then an Autumnal or Spring fever in general. Meanwhile I will, so long as I am yet uncoffined, write something every Sunday for the public toread, two or three lines at least, if myplanshouldsucceed. Even my style suffers terribly; here are the two verbs rhyming....
Ye pleasant biographical Sundays! I shall never spend another. In addition to the ills which I have already mentioned, there is a live lizard has taken up his abode in my stomach, whose spawn I must have swallowed in an unfortunate draught last summer....
Of cherry-stones sprouting in the stomach as well as peas in the ear, there are examples. But I have never yet read of an instance, in which the seed of gooseberries, which we usually swallow with the fruit, has germinated in the bowels, when these by constipation had become the forcing vat of the aforesaid vegetable. Good heavens! what will be the final upshot of my malady, whose invisible claw seizes, cramps, distends, rends asunder my nerves and my vitals...!
If there is a malady which is a compilation of all maladies, all chapters of pathology at once, nobody has it but I. Apoplexy--hectic--cramp in the stomach or a lizard--three kinds of fever--polypus in the heart--sprouting gooseberry bushes:--such are the fewvisibleconstituents and ingredients which I have thus far been able to announce of my malady; a judicious deeper section of my poor body will, when both classes of constituents shall have laid it low, add to these the invisible ones also....
An ominous pleurisy--if one may put any faith in the entire system of semeiology and the hard beatings of the pulse and strictures in the chest--has grasped and held me since day before yesterday and threatens to make an end of my maltreated life and of this biography--unless by a fortunate cure death should be softened into an empyema[88]--or into a phthisis--or vomica [abscess] or into a scirrhus [glandular induration], or else into an ulcer.----After such a heating, one has only to bore into my breast, so as to draw out, from that source whence there once came a book full of the milk of human kindness, life and the morbid matter together....
You good readers! who have followed me with your indulgent eyes from the chess-board of the first section to the death-bed of the last, my road and our acquaintance are at an end--may life never be a burden to you--may your practical eye never forget in the little field the great one; in this first life the next; in men, yourselves--may dreams crown your life and may none affright your dying hour ... My sister shall conclude all.... Live happily and sink happily to sleep!...
My good and martyred brother will have it that I should finish this book. Ah, his sister would not be able to do it for grief, if it should become necessary. But I hope to heaven that my brother is not so sick as he fancies. After dinner indeed he has such a notion. And I, if we are both to have any peace, must needs confirm him in it, and acknowledge him to be just as sick as he imagines himself. Yesterday the schoolmaster had to rap on his chest, that he might hear whether it rang, because a certain Avenbrügger in Vienna had written that this ringing showed sound lungs. Unfortunately it rang but little, and he therefore gives himself up; but I will, without his knowledge, write to Dr. Fenk, that he may allay his qualms. I have further to state that young Mr. von Falkenberg is sick at the house of his parents in Ober-Scheerau, and that my friend Beata is also sick with hers.... It is a gloomy winter for us all. May the spring heal every heart and restore to me and the readers of this book my dear brother!
Once more you are to have him--the Brother and Biographer! In freedom and gladness I come forth again; the winter and my craziness are over and clear joy dwells in every second, on every octavo page, in every drop of ink.
It happened thus: Every imagined sickness presupposes an actual: nevertheless there are imaginary causes of sickness. My alternation between health and sickness, between merry and mournful, soft and stern moods, had reached, in its rapidity and its contrasts, the maximum point; I could no longer, for want of breath, dictate a protocol, and as to the scenes of this biography I could not so much as conceive them; when on a ruddy, glowing winter evening, I sallied out and strode round through the rosy-tinted snow, and in this snow lighted on the wordheureusement.
I shall never cease to think of this word on the wax-tablet of the snow; it was beautifully engraved in the lapidary style with a bamboo-cane. "Fenk;" I exclaimed mechanically. "Thou canst not be far away," thought I; for as every European (even on his plantations) tries the nib of his pen on a special word, and as the Doctor had already filled whole sheets with the trial-wordheureusementas first impression of his pen, I knew at once how it was. And he sat down with me and laughed at me (to be sure more at my sister's history of the sickness than at my invalid appearance) till I, not knowing whether I ought to laugh or be angry, did, as well as I could, one after the other. But soon he fell into my own condition and was obliged himself to do one after the other--when we came to a history which put us, namely the whole hypochondriacal committee of safety, to shame; which I nevertheless relate.
There happened to be, namely in the room with us, a near cousin of mine, named Fedderlein, who is both cobbler and steeple-warder of Scheerau; he cares for the boots and for the safety of the city and has to do both with leather and (on account of his ringing) with chronology. My near cousin was coal-black and troubled, not on account of my sickness, but on account of his wife, who had died of it. This case of sickness and death he would fain communicate to me and the doctor, by way of enlightening the latter and affecting the former. And he would have succeeded, had he not unfortunately snatched a ripping-knife from my Philippina and in the absorption of his own attention to the tale of mortality, pounded vehemently on the table. I immediately proposed to myself not to suffer it. My hand therefore crept along--my eyes meanwhile holding his fixed--nearer and nearer to the said hammer in order to stop it.
But my cousin's hand politely evaded it and kept on pounding. I would gladly have been profoundly moved, for he came nearer and nearer to the last hours of my deceased kinswoman--but I could not withdraw my ears from the foundry-work of the knife-handle. Fortunately I saw little Wutz standing there, and hurriedly borrowed the unlucky knife of the hammerer and with it in my nervousness cut out for the child one or two halves of fastnight-cracknels.
So there I stood rescued and had the knife to myself. But now he began drumming with his disarmed fingers upon the key-board of the table, and provided his wife in his novel with the holy supper. I tried to subdue myself and my ears; but as, partly the internal conflict, partly my intense attention to his drumming fingers, which I could hear only with the greatest difficulty, drew me wholly away from my good cousin, who was certainly a wife and a steeple-wardress such as few are, I soon had enough of it and caught at his organ-playing hand of torture, put it under arrest, and broke out: "O my dear, worthy cousin Fedderlein!" He surmised that I was affected: and became himself still more so, forgot himself, and with the still unarrested fingers of his left hand continued to tap too vigorously on the table.
I undertook, like a stoic, to help myself out from this station of misery by an internal effort, and while the outward tinkling went on behind me, placed before my mind my good cousin and her deathbed: "and so then," I eloquently soliloquized, "thou liest there, poor faded flower, stiff and motionless, and, so to speak, dead!"--At this moment the trip-hammer became quite furious. I could not help it, but I took the left hand of the historian prisoner also and pressed it partly with emotion. "You can both imagine," said he, "how I felt, as if the steeple fell upon me, when one had to take her up on his back like a sack, and so carry her down the seven stairs." I was beside myself, first at the thought of that, and secondly, because I felt in my hand the effort of his toward a new tattooing; I broke down and said: "for heaven's sake, my dear cousin, for the sake of the good deceased saint, if one has any regard for his own cousin ..."
"I will come to an end presently," said he, "if it takes such a hold of you." "No;" said I, "only I beg you not to drum so! But such acousin we twoshall neither of us be likely soon to have again!" For I was fairly beside myself.
And yet life, like a miniature painting, is made up of such points, of such moments. Stoicism can often keep off the club of the hour, but not the gnat-sting of the second.
My doctor--(while my cousin put the question: "What was my worthy cousin's meaning?")--took me out of the room and said gravely: "Dear Jean Paul, thou art my true friend, a government-advocate, a Maussenbach audienza, an author in the biographical department--but a fool nevertheless, I mean a hypochondriae."
In the evening he demonstrated the double proposition. O, on that evening, good Fenk, thou didst draw me out of the laws and the poison-fangs of hypochondria, which sprinkle their pungent juice over all moments! Thy whole dispensary lay on thy tongue! Thy prescriptions were satires, and thy cure enlightenment!
"Set it down in thy biography"--he began, and thrust his hands into his muff--"that there is in thy case do imitating Herr Thümmel and his doctor and their medical college, which consisted half of the patient and half of the physician--that I even scold thee; for that is in fact what I am going to do. Tell me, where has thy reason been all this time; nay, where hast thou kept thy conceptive faculty that thou hast been, bodily, in the devil's hands? Don't answer me that the learned are here of too many different opinions--['Who shall decide when doctors disagree?']--that Willis places conception in thecorpus callosum--Posidonius, on the contrary, in the front chamber, as does Ætius also--and Glaser in the ovalcentrum. The thing is only a lively figure of speech; but inasmuch as thou confusest me thereby, I will attack thee in another quarter. Tell me--or do you tell me, dear Philippina, how could you allow the patient hitherto to have so many exalted, touching or poetic emotions and to write them down for other people? Could you not have overturned his inkstand or coffeepot, or the whole writing-table? The strain of sentimental fancy is of all intellectual processes the most enervating; an algebraist always outlives a tragic poet."
"And a physiologist, too," said I, "Haller's cursed and yet admirable physiology came near working me into the grave; the eight volumes here."
"For that very reason," he continued, "this anatomical octupla fastens the fancy, which was wont to hover only over fleeting poetic pastures, to sharply defined and minute objects; hence...."
"Fortunately," I interrupted him, "I could always recover myself and my fancy tolerably well by brown beer,[89]which I had to take (if I would get my breath) so long as I sat over Herrn von Haller. In this vehicle, and in this diluted form, I could more easily get down that medicine of the mind, physiology. I cannot possibly, therefore, unless I would become the greatest of drinkers, become the greatest physiologist."
"That is well," said he impatiently, and pulled the tail out of his muff, "but it comes to nothing. Thou and I stand here talking mere digressions, instead of consecutive and logical paragraphs: the reviewers of thy biography must think me very unsystematic.
"I will now talk like a book or like a doctor's dissertation; besides I ought to write one for a medical candidate with a passion for the doctorate, and I would therein go through with thenervus ischiaticusor thenervus sympatheticus; I will let all that be and speak here and in the dissertation of weak nerves generally.
"Every physician must have a favorite malady, which he sees oftener than any other--mine is nervous debility. Sensitive, weak, overstrained nerves, hysterical conditions and thy hypochondria,--are different baptismal names of my one darling malady.
"One can get it as early as an hereditary nobility--even the hereditary nobility itself, almost all the higher women and highest children have it at first hand--then not all doctors hats can remove it, any more than they can the eternal torments, but only alleviate it.
"But thou hast gained it, like the bought-nobility, by merit."
"Say rather, it is itself a merit," said I, "and a hypochondriac is own brother to a learned man, if he is not in fact that very one; just as the measles, which attack monkeys as well as men, set the seal upon their relationship to our race."
"But thy merit," he continued, "is much easier to cure. If one should take from thee three kinds of thing, namely, thy pathologicalfever-dreams, thymedicine-glassesand thybooks, then would the entire sickness go with them. I am always forgetting that I was to discourse like a dissertation. Then for the fever-visions. The most miserable semeiology or diagnosis is certainly not the Chinese, but the hypochondriacal. Thy malady and a stoical virtue are alike in this, that whoever has one has all. Thou stoodst there as apawn-bearing statue, on which pathology hung all her insignia and signs--miserably hast thou been trudging round, under thy medical armor-bearing and thy semeiotic land-freight of heart-polypus, macerated lung-lobes, stomach-inhabitants, etc."
"Ah!" I replied; "all is discharged, and I bear nothing more upon my brain but a capillary or hair-net of swollen veins, or such a kind of diver's-cap of death as the people commonly call a stroke of apoplexy."
"A fool's cap thou hast on, in thy inner man; for this is the way the thing stands. In the hypochondriac all nerves are weak, but those are the weakest which he has most abused. Now, as one mostly contracts this weakness by sitting, studying and writing, and consequently deprives the bowels, which yet must be the Moloch of these intellectual children, of all the motion which is given to the fingers; one confounds the sick bowels with sick nerves and hopes that Kämpf's visceral-syringe will prove a double-barreled musket against the one and the other. Believe it not, however; a hypochondrical chest may rest upon a vigorous abdomen. It is not that the lobes of the lungs are impaired, if they sometimes flag, but that the lung-nerves are exhausted of animation, by which the lung-wings should be lifted, or else the nerves of the cuticle. If my gastric nerves are unstrung, then thou hast as much dizziness and nausea, as if there were actually a dietetic sediment in the stomach or a flow of blood on the brain. Even a weak stomach is not always a consequence of weak nerves; only observe how greedily a faint hectic patient eats and digests half an hour before death. Hence, thy yellow, autumnal color, thy fleshless petrifaction of the bones, thy remittent pulse, even thy fainting have--nothing to say, my dear Paul."
"Ha! the devil!" said the patient!
"For," said the doctor, "as all is carried on by the nerves, whereof the learned class to which I belong often do not so much as know the definition, accordingly the periodical and movable, but fleeting, cramps and exhaustion of the nerves gradually run through the whole semeiology, but not the entire pathology. Now comes on the second paragraph of my gold-edged dissertation."
"What then has become of the first?" I asked.
"That was it: accordingly the second throws all medicine-vials into the street, blows all powders into the air, with lightnings of excommunication lays all cursed stomach medicines in ashes, empties even warm and often cold bath-tubs, and shoves Kämpf's clyster-machines under the sick-bed and is exceeding mad. For the nerves can no more be strengthened in a week (even by the best iron-cure) than they can be exhausted in a week (by the greatest excess); their strength returns with as slow steps as it departed. Medicine must therefore be changed into food--and as this is injurious--consequently food must be changed into medicine."
"I eat very few things."
"That is the most blamable intemperance; and the stomach exercises then according to its powers a kind of skepticism, or Fabiism, or at least apathy. Invert rather the literary rule (multum non multa) and eat many kinds of things, but notmuch. Dietetics have no commands to give as to thekind, in eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., but only as todegree. At most, every one has his own rainbow, his own belief, his own stomach and his own--system of diet. And yet all this is not my third candidate's paragraph; but here it is first presented: Simplemovementof the body is the first assistant physician against hypochondria; and--as I have already seen hypochondria and motion united in a movabletiers état--simple absence of all motion of the soul is the first body-physician against the entire devil. Passions are as unwholesome as their enemy, thinking, or their friend, poetizing; only the complete coalition of them all is more poisonous still.
"Under the influence of the passions," he continued, "grief, like thawy weather, dissolves all the powers, just as enjoyment is the strongest of all levers of the nerves. I will now bring all thy medicinal blunders and illegalities into a heap that thou mayst just hear a true account of thyself."
"I pay no attention to it," said I.
"But thou hast nevertheless, like all hypochondriacs and all weak women, acted outrageously and oiled now the stomach, now the lungs,i. e., now the cog-wheel, now the lever-wheel, now the dial-plate-wheel, while the propelling weight lay broken off or run down, on the ground. Like the one-legged mussel, thou hast adhered by suction to thy study rock; and--this was in fact the one only bad thing about it--with the burning and languid breast of a brooding hen, thou satst upon thy biographical eggs and sections and wouldst fain keep up with the living. Where all the while was thy conscience, thy sister, thy scholarly fame, thy stomach?"
"Don't wag thy muff-tail so violently, Fenk, but rather throw it into bed."
"My doctor's dissertation and thy sickness, too, are both over, when thy activity, as in a state, decreases from above downward;--the head inactive, the heart beating gaily, the feet on the run; and then let March come on as soon as it will." ...
I followed his directions some months in succession, in order to restore my poor bodyin integrum--and when I had once renounced the yellow ratsbane and mildew of the nerves, namely coffee and wit, and substituted for these two brown beer and my Wutz, all at once my room grew bright, Auenthal and the heavens radiant, men laid aside their faults, all surfaces grew green, all throats warbled, all hearts smiled, I sneezed for light and delight, and thought: Either a goddess has come or Spring--it was in fact both, and the goddess was Heath.
And on thy altar alone will I in future write my biographical leaves!--the Pestilentiary will not have it otherwise; his conclusions and recipes are these: "I would"--said he--"in my biography, like the Torrid Zone, skip over the whole winter with all its incidents, especially as, like the winter in that zone, it consists only in rain (from the eyes). I would, if I were in thy place, say Doctor Fenk will not have it, will not suffer it, will not read it; I must, instead of wheezing along and harrowing with my pen at a distance of three hundred and sixty-five hours after the actual history which has stridden ahead scattering its seed, rather keep hard behind the present and press it upon the silhouette board and so sketch it off at once. I would"--Fenk continued--"advise the reader just to attack Dr. Fenk, who is alone to blame that I have given of the whole winter only the following wretched extract:"--The good Gustavus pined away the winter in Professor Hoppedizel's house with his parents, who had there their usual winter quarters--he exhausted his brain in order to exhaust his heart and to forget another; repented his fault, but also his over hasty farewell letter; exposed his wounds to the philosophical north wind of the Professor, who played on a delicate instrument like Gustavus as on a pedal, with his feet; and by confinement, thought and yearning, consumed those blossoms of life which even spring can hardly call forth or paint over again.
Beata--whose womanly eye probably found again with ease the goddess and disposer of her joys, from whom she had without difficulty separated herself under the pretext of sickness by her furnished--would have dismantled and bowed herself even more, had it not been for my romancing colleague Oefel; who sufficiently annoyed her and infused into her cup of sorrow refreshing drops of anger, by coming constantly and, in the loveliest veiled and desolate eye of forsaken love, detecting and demanding a love that belonged to himself. At this moment she is drinking, at Fenk's command, the waters of Lilienbad and lives alone with a chambermaid--God grant that May may lift up the drooping flower-bud of thy spirit, which thy pale form encloses and weighs down, like flowers under new-fallen snow and from whose flower-leaves the snow-crust will melt away only under the vernal sun of the remote second heaven!
Ottomar has scolded away and fought through the winter; has a large correspondence; pleads, like myself, but against every poisonous ancestral tree anddog-staron the coat, most of all against the princely hat of his brother; which the latter throws at subjects and catches them like so many butterflies. He thinks an advocate is the only tribune of the people against the administration; only that thereadingof advocates has hitherto been worse than theirspelling, which the late Heinecke decried as worse than original sin and the pestilence. I might also hold him to be the author of a satire upon the Prince, which was laid before the throne during the winter, and which was the god-father's letter of a robber accompanied by the prayer that the Prince would give his little thief's-dauphin hisname, as if he were a minister, and would adopt him in case his parents should be hanged. I was most struck with certain satirical touches, which betrayed a finer hand;e. g., that the State was a human pyramid, such as is often formed by rope-dancers, the top or which was made by a boy.--That the people was tough and flexible like grass, was not broken by the tread of the foot, and grew up again, even if it were bitten off or cut off, and the pleasantest height it could reach for a monarch's eye was the smooth-shorn level of the park grass.--Thieves and robbers were accounted as separatists and dissenters in the State, and lived under a heavier yoke than that of the Jews, without any civil honor, excluded from office, in caves, like the first Christians, and exposed to similar persecutions; such citizens, however, who promoted luxury and circulation of money and trade more effectually than any ambassador, were dealt with severely as they are for the simple reason that this religious sect held peculiar opinions about the seventh commandment, which in fact differed only in expression from those of other sects, etc., etc.
The author may however even be an actual member of this secret society, which on the whole steals more humorously and harmlessly than any other. They lately stopped the mail-coach and took nothing from it except a count's diploma, which was on its way to some one who was hardly worth the freight of it--furthermore, they demanded on one occasion, like a higher tribunal, of the extra-coach certain important papers, of which I may not venture here to speak--and a fortnight ago their privateers stopped before the gates of the theatrical and masquerade wardrobe and threw out their nets over the personages hanging therein; there remained afterward no dresses for acting and masking except those of peasants. I take them to be the same ones who, as the reader knows, abstracted long ago the black coverings from the mourning pulpits and altars.
Thus, then, would the biographical winter be done away and melted off. When thou hast written so much--said Fenk--then journey to Lilienbad and use the springs and the doctor of the springs--myself--and the guest of the springs--Gustavus; for the latter cannot get well there without the lily-water and the lily-country; I must persuade him thither, whoever may be already there. Rejoice, we are going to see a paradise, and thou art the first author in the paradise, not Adam.
"The finest bed in this Eden"--said I--"is that my work is no romance; otherwise the critics would not let five such persons as we are come at once to the baths, they would pretend it was improbable that we should all meet at once in such a heaven. But as it is I have the actual good fortune of simply composing a description from the life, and that I and the rest in a body really exist, even out of my head."
The reader can now learn the birthday of this section: it is just a day later than our good fortune--in short tomorrow we set out, I and Philippina, and to-day I write to him [the reader], Gustavus is simply borne away by a stream of friendly and medical representations, and to-morrow is carried by us to his destination. Fortuna has this time no vapors nor one-sided headaches; everything favors us; all is packed up; my dilatory pleas are written--no one can come from Maussenbach to disturb me--the heavens are heavenly-blue, and I need not believe my eyes, but thecyanometer[90]of M. von Saussure--I look as blooming as the spring and its fluttering butterflies--in short, nothing were wanting to my happiness excepting that to-day's section were happily written, which I have been playing out up to this very day in order to have the whole past behind me, and not to have to describe anything to-morrow except tomorrow....
And as that, now, is also done--now then, blue May! spread out thy loving arms, open thy heavenly-blue eyes, unveil thy virgin-face, and walk the earth that all creatures, intoxicated with bliss, may fall upon thy cheeks, into thy arms, at thy feet and the biographer too may lie down somewhere!