Chapter XV: Part 15

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 of _lapis 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, a _moral_ figure is found to be as intolerable and stiff as a _geometric_ one 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, _sedes_ in 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?"

THIRTY-NINTH, OR 1st EPIPHANY, SECTION.

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....

FORTIETH, OR 2d EPIPHANY, SECTION.

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....

FORTY-FIRST, OR 3d EPIPHANY, SECTION.

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 to _read_, two or three lines at least, if my _plan_ should _succeed_. Even my style suffers terribly; here are the two verbs rhyming....

FORTY-SECOND, OR 4th EPIPHANY, SECTION.

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....

FORTY-THIRD, OR 5th AND 6th EPIPHANY, SECTION.

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...!

FORTY-FOURTH, OR SEPTUAGESIMA, SECTION.

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 few _visible_ constituents 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....

FORTY-FIFTH, OR SEXAGESIMA, SECTION.

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....

FORTY-SIXTH, OR ESTO-MIHI, SECTION.

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!...

FORTY-SEVENTH, OR INVOCAVIT, SECTION.

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 Avenbruegger 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!

FORTY-EIGHTH, OR MAY, SECTION.

The Pounding Cousin.--Cure.--Bathing.--Caravan.

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 word _heureusement_.

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-word _heureusement_ as 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 a _cousin we two_ shall 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 Thuemmel 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 the _corpus callosum_--Posidonius, on the contrary, in the front chamber, as does AEtius also--and Glaser in the oval _centrum_. 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 the _nervus ischiaticus_ or the _nervus 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 pathological _fever-dreams_, thy _medicine-glasses_ and thy _books_, 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 a _pawn-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 Kaempf'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 Kaempf'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 not _much_. Dietetics have no commands to give as to the _kind_, in eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., but only as to _degree_. 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: Simple _movement_ of the body is the first assistant physician against hypochondria; and--as I have already seen hypochondria and motion united in a movable _tiers etat_--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 body _in 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 and _dog-star_ on 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 the _reading_ of advocates has hitherto been worse than their _spelling_, 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 his _name_, 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 the _cyanometer_[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!

FORTY-NINTH SECTION, OR FIRST SECTION OF JOY.

The Fog.--Lilienbad.

Receive us with thy flowery Eden, veiled Lilienbad, me, Gustavus and my sister, give our dreams an earthly floor that they may play before us, and be thou as beautiful in thy twilight haze as a Past!

To-day we made our entry and our _avant-courier_ was a sporting butterfly which we drove before us from one flowery station to another. And the path of my pen, also, shall lead over no less charming ground.

The morning of to-day had submerged the whole Auenthal landscape under a sea of fog. The cloudy heavens rested low down upon our flowers. We sallied forth and went into these fluid heavens, into which, generally, only the Alps carry us up. Overhead on this globe of mist the sun painted itself like a paling mock-sun; at last the white ocean ran off into long streams--on the woods lay hanging mountains, every low place was covered with gleaming clouds, overhead the blue celestial circle opened wider and wider, till at length the earth took off from the heavens its tremulous veil and gazed joyfully into the great, eternal face--the white raiment of heaven (as my sister said) laid together by itself still fluttered on the trees, and the fleeces of cloud still overhung blossoms and floated as blond-laces around flowers--at last the landscape was sprinkled with the glittering gold-grains of the dew, and the meadows were overlaid as with magnified wings of butterflies. A cleansed and exhilarating May air cooled as with ice the draught of the lungs, the sun looked down joyously upon our sparkling spring and gazed and glowed into all globules of dew, as God does into all souls.... Oh, if I, this morning, when all things seemed to embrace us and when we sought to embrace all, could not answer myself, when I asked myself: "Was ever thy virtue as pure as thy enjoyment and for what hours does _this_ one come to reward thee?"--still less can I now answer, when I see that man can renew his joys, but not his deserts by remembrance, and that the fibres of our brains are the chords of an AEolian harp, which under the breath of a long-forgotten hour begin again to sound. The great Spirit of the Universe could not transform for us the whole stubborn chaotic mass with flowers; but he gave our spirits the power to make out of the second more ductile chaos, out of the globe of the brain, nothing but rose-fields and sunny shapes. Fortunate Rousseau--more fortunate than thou thyself knowest! The heaven which thou hast now won will differ in nothing from that which thy fancy here laid out, except in this, that thou inhabitest it not alone....

But just that makes the infinite difference; and where could I have felt it more sweetly, than by the side of my sister, whose glances have been the reflection of our sky, whose sighs the echo of our brotherly and sisterly harmony. Only be thou always so, precious darling! who hast suffered as much from the sick man as I from the sickness! Besides I know not which I oftener take back from thee, my blame or my praise!

Full of unuttered thoughts we arrived at Unter-Scheerau and found our pale traveling-companion all ready, my Gustavus. He was silent much of the time and his words lay under the pressure of his thoughts; the outer sunshine paled to inner moonlight, for no man is cheery when he is seeking or hoping to find the best that one can lose here below--Health and Love. As in such cases the chords of the soul do not fail to be put out of tune save under the lightest fingers, _i. e_., those of woman, accordingly I let _mine_ rest and _female_ fingers play, those of my sister.

When, at length, we had waded through many a stream of fragrance--for one often, out in the air, goes along by little flower-gales, without knowing whence they blow;--and when all the haze of the day's joy had condensed, before the eye, into an evening-dew and sunk with the sun; when that part of the sky over which the sun flamed began to glow white before glowing red, whereas the eastern quarter came forth in dark blue to meet the night; when we had followed with our eyes every bird and butterfly and traveler going in the direction of Lilienbad;--then at last did the lovely vale, into which we brought with us so many hopes as seeds of future joys, open to us its bosom. Our entry was at the eastern end; at the western the sun looked at us along the earth toward which he was going down, and as if from rapture over his well-spent day, melted into an evening-redness which floated through the whole valley and ascended even to the summits of the trees. I never saw the like; it lay, as if it had fallen in drops, in the bushes, on the grass and foliage and painted sky and earth to the likeness of one rosy cup. Single cottages, sometimes pairs of them, embowered themselves with trees; living lattices of twigs pressed themselves up on the prospects of the chambers and overspread the happy one who looked out at these pictures of bliss with shadows, perfumes, blossoms and fruits. The sun had gone down: the vale, like a widowed princess, put on a veil of white fragrant mist, and with its thousand throats sank into silence.

Oh, if our days in Lilienbad should be destined one day to die on thorns; if, instead of sections of joy, I should have to write sections of sorrow; if this is one day to be, then the reader will know it beforehand in the fact of my leaving off from the section the word "joy," and instead of the superscription make only crosses. But it is impossible; I can conclude my sheet in peace. Beata still breathes a low evening-song into her chorded echo; when both have died away then will sleep extinguish the light of the senses in the dwellers of Lilienbad and spread out the night-piece of dream in the twilight of souls....

FIFTIETH, OR SECOND JOY, SECTION.

The Springs.--The Wail of Love.

I went to sleep in the first heaven and woke up in the third. One should never wake up in any but strange places--nor in any chambers except those into which the morning-sun flings its first flames--and before only those windows where the green shadows burn like a traced name in the heavenly firework, and where the bird screams among the leaves through which he is skipping....

I could wish my future reviewer were living with me in my chamber at Lilienbad; he would not (as he does) break over my joy-sections the aesthetic staff, but an oak-twig to crown their father....

That father is just now a ladies' tailor, but merely in the following sense: in the centre of Lilienbad is the medicinal spring, from which is drawn the dispensary gushing out or the earth; from this spring radiate in regular symmetry the artificial peasants'-cottages, which the bathing guests occupy; each of these little cottages is decorated in jest with the hung-out emblem or signature of one or another trade. My little house holds out a pair of shears as a technical _insigne_, to announce that its occupant (myself) drives the trade of a ladies' tailor. My sister (to judge by the exponent of a wooden stocking) is a stocking-weaver; next door to her swings a wooden boot or a wooden leg (who can tell which?) which tells us as plainly as a journeyman's greeting, that the occupant is a shoemaker, who is no other than my Gustavus.

Against Beata's cottage, which like ladies of the present day has on a hat or roof of straw, rests a long ladder, which indicates the fair peasant-woman dwelling within, and is the Jacob's ladder, at the foot of which is seen at least _one_ angel.

It is well known even in foreign parts, that our principality has and must have its healing springs as well as any one on the princely bench, for everyone of them must carry round with it such a pharmaceutic well as a flask, to smell of, against financial fainting; further, it may be well known that once many guests came hither, and now not a cat--and for this, not the springs, but the Chamber of Finance is to blame, which has built too much into the place and wants to get too much out of it, and which began at as dear a rate as the Selter's springs ended--that consequently our springs will end as cheaply as those began--and that our Lilienbad, with all its medicinal virtues, has not after all the more important one of making people as sick as a chamber-maid--I said, that is all sufficiently well known, and therefore I need not in fact have said it at all.

To be sure, it is not a merit in other healing springs, if they are popular resorts of the sick, around which the whole great and rich world stands in priestly attitude; had we only here in Lilienbad also such female angels as in other watering-places, to agitate the pool of Bethesda and impart to it a medicinal virtue, which is the _reverse_ of that of the Biblical one; had we players who should compel the guests to sit, attendant physicians who should force them to swig, not sip, the eau-de-vie, then would our springs be as capable as any others in Germany of putting the tippling guests into such a state that they would come again every year. But as it is, our Board of Inspection will have to see again and again the sick phalanx of the great world roll by us and throng to other springs; as the wild beasts do round one in Africa; and if Pliny[91] explains by these animal-conventions the proverb in the note, I too would find a key to similar novelties in the mineral-spring-congresses.

The Exchequer is after all the most to be pitied, that in our Valley of Jehosaphat, nothing is to be found but Nature, Blessedness, Temperance and Resurrection.

To-day we all drank, at the _Baquet_ (or water-trough) the water drawn off over iron, amidst the noise of birds and leaves, and swallowed down the image of the sun that gleamed up out of it and its fire too. The winter of sorrow has drawn around the eyelids of Beata and around her mouth the inexpressibly tender lines and letters of her faded grief; her large eye is a sunny heaven, from which escape glistening drops. As a maiden can unfold the peacock's-mirror of her charms with another maiden more easily than with a male person, so she gained greatly by her play with my sister. Gustavus--was invisible, he drank his water after the rest and lost himself amidst the charms of the country, in order, strictly speaking, to escape the greater charms of its fair inhabitant. Except the happiness of seeing her he knew no greater than that of not seeing her. She never speaks of him, nor he of her; his thoughts of her which yearn outward do not grow into words, but only into blushes. Would to Heaven I were composing a romance instead of a biography! then would I bring you, fair souls, nearer together and reconstruct a friendly circle out of its segments; then should we both secure even here such a heaven, that if death should come along looking for us, that worthy man would not know whether we were already settled there or whether we were still waiting for him to get us in....

I acted at once judiciously and delicately, in bringing before Gustavus at this time, as I now do before my readers, a certain sketch which Beata made in the winter and which I came by in an equally honorable and ingenious manner. It is addressed to the picture of her brother and consists of questions. Grief lies upon woman's heart, which yields patiently to its burden, far more heavily than on man's, which by throbbing and thumping labors to shake it off; as on the motionless fir-peaks all the snow piles itself up, whereas on the lower twigs, which are always in motion, none remains.

"_To the Picture of my Brother._

"Why dost thou look on me so smilingly, thou precious image? Why dost thy pictured eye remain forever dry, when mine is so full of tears before thee? Oh, how I would love thee, wert thou painted mourning!

"Ah, Brother! dost thou not still long for a sister, does thy heart never tell thee that there is in the desolate world yet another which loves thee so unspeakably?-~Ah had I but _once_ set my eyes upon thee, clasped thee in my arms ... we could never forget each other! But now, if thou too art forsaken like thy sister, if thou too, like her, ploddest on under a rainy heaven and over a dreary earth, and findest no friend in the hours of sorrow--ah, in that case, thou hast not even a sister's likeness, before which thy heart may bleed to death! Oh, Brother! if thou art good and unhappy, then come to thy sister and take her whole heart--it is torn, but not asunder, and only bleeds! Oh, it would love thee so! Why dost thou not long for a sister? O thou unseen one, if thou too art abandoned, art deceived, art forgotten by strangers, why dost thou not long for a faithful sister? When can I tell thee, how often I have passed thy mute image to my heart, how often I have gazed upon it for hours together, and imagined my tears into its painted eyes, till I myself have burst into a flood of real tears at the thought?--Tarry not so long that thy sister with her worn-out heart shall repose under the coffin-lid, and with all her vain yearnings, her vain tears, her vain love, shall have crumbled into cold, forgotten earth! Nor tarry so long that our youthful meadows shall meanwhile have been mowed down and snowed over, and the heart has stiffened, and years and sorrows have become too many. There comes all at once over my soul so sad, so bitter a feeling.... Art thou perhaps already dead, dear one?--Ah, the thought benumbs my heart--turn thine eyes away, if thou art in bliss, from thy orphaned sister, and behold not her sorrows--ah, I put to myself the heavy question in my bleeding heart: _What have I left to love me?_ and I give myself no answer...."

* * * * *

The reader has the courage to divine from this more to Gustavus's advantage than he himself can. To him, as the hero of this book, this leaf must be a welcome one; but I, as his mere biographer, have nothing from it but two or three more heavy scenes, which however I gladly despatch out of true love for the reader--billions of them would I work out for his pleasure. Only it does my whole biography harm, that the persons whom I have set to work at the same time set me to work, and that the writer of this history or protocol is himself one of the heroes and parties. I should perhaps be more impartial, too, if I composed this history two or three decades or centuries after its birth, as they will have to do who shall in future draw from me. The artists direct the portrait-painter to sit three times as far off from the original as it is tall--and as Princes are so great and consequently can only be drawn by authors who sit at a distance from them, of place or time, equal to such greatness--accordingly it were to be desired that I did not stand so near to the Prince, so that I might portray less partially than I do....

FIFTY-FIRST, OR THIRD JOY, SECTION.

Sunday Morning.--Open Table.--Tempest.--Love.

What a Sunday!--To-day is Monday. I know no means of discharging myself, I who (as we all have by our insulation), have become an electrophorus of joy, except by writing, unless, indeed, I should dance. Gustavus makes himself heard over here: he has for a conductor a harpsichord and plays on it. The harpsichord will lighten this section for me and fling out to me many sparks of thought. I have often wished only to be rich enough to keep (as the Greeks did) a fellow of my own who should make music as long as I was writing. Heavens! what _opera omnia_ would bloom out! The world would at least experience the pleasurable result, that whereas, hitherto, so many pieces of poetical patchwork (_e. g_. the Medea) have become the occasion of musical masterpieces, the case would be reversed, and that musical blanks would produce poetical prizes.

Yesterday, before day, we rose from our beds, I and my musical _souffleur_. "We must," I said to him, "stir round out of doors four good hours before we go to church."--Namely, to _Ruhestatt_, where the excellent Herr Buerger of Grossenhayn[92] was to appear as invited preacher. So said, so done. Up to this hour I know not whether to prefer a tepid summer night or a cold summer morning: in the former the melted[93] heart dissolves in longing; the latter consolidates the glowing heart to joy and steels its throbbings. In order to reproduce our four hours one would have to bring together the minutes from a hundred summer-houses and hunting-lodges, and even then the description would limp. Morning twilight is to the day what spring is to summer, evening twilight to the night, autumn to winter. We saw and heard and smelt and felt, how one bit of the day gradually woke up after another--how the morning passed over lawn and garden and perfumed them like the morning-chambers of the great with flowers and blossoms--how it opened (so to speak) all windows, that a cooling draught of air might sweep through the whole theatre--how every throat woke every other and invited it into the breezy heights, that they might, with intoxicated bosom, soar to meet the low and rising sun and sing him a welcome--how the changeable sky ground and melted a thousand colors and touched and painted its drapery of clouds.... So far had the morning advanced, when we were still walking in the dewy vale. But when we passed out from its eastern gate into an immense meadow mosaically laid out with growing garlands and stirring foliage, whose soft wave-line sank into deeps and flowed up into heights, so as to keep its charms and flowers moving upward and downward--when we stood before all this--then uprose the storm of bliss and of the living day, and the east wind moved along beside it, and the great sun stood and throbbed like a heart in heaven and set all streams and drops of life whirling around him.

(Gustavus plays at this moment more softly, and his tones arrest my breath which passes over more and more easily into hypochondriacal intensity.)

Now when the mill of Creation roared and stormed with all its wheels and streams, in our sweet intoxication we hardly cared to go on, everywhere we were delighted; we were rays of light, broken on their way by every medium; we journeyed with the bee and the ant and followed every fragrance to its very source, and walked around every tree; every creature was a pole-star that led our needle into deflections and inflections. We stood in a circle of villages, whose roads were all bringing out joyous churchgoers and whose bells were ringing in the holy fair. At last we too followed the devout pilgrimage and entered the cool Ruhestatt church.