First Fruit Piece
Letter of Dr. Victor to Cato the Elder, on the Conversion of I Into Thou, He, She, Ye, and They; or, The Feast of Kindness of the 20th March
Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.
My dear Cato the Elder,
A breaker of his word like you—who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come—will have to be punished by having his mouth—not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers—but made to water. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.
Our flotilla of three boats—(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)—got under way about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider’s-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed—the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy—Melchior—Jean Paul—the Government Counsellor,—Flamin—the lovely Luna—(off goes the first of your curses here!)—the undersigned, and his wife.
Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o’clock) we meant to enter upon a “stream of life,” coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine—thin pleasure camp amid the waves—long before. Luna, elder Cato—if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body—Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow for everybody who was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as at all this together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul—but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.
The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna where you were. She said, “At the Frankfort Fair.” Was she right?
When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the Anguis Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectual Place d’Armes and theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal—his own advertisement in the “Hue and Cry”; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses’ depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief Piqueur (a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)—and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.
As Lieutenant de Police of the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread of our talk towards the Piqueur in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the Piqueur’s avarice, saying that people who didn’t bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did—cast their pieces of silver into the church before their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, “Misers are the only people who haven’t had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death’s hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth’s surface with, their bleeding moiety.”
“Ah!” said I, “everyone is a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chastening himself as I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins—and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens in his cabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is between our opinions of the two.” I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of the Piqueur at this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o’clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul—and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o’clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.
It was now past three. In thirty-eight minutes, spring, that pre-heaven upon earth—that second paradise—would make her grand processional progress over the ruins of the first. Already the clouds were all cleared away from the sky, spring breezes played coolingly about the sun, burning in the blue; on a vine-clad hill by the Rhine shore, a solo-singer from the great choir of spring—a nightingale—sent on in advance of her—was pouring out her song in a smooth-grown thicket of pruned cherry-trees; through the open trellis-work of the boughs we could see the notes vibrate in the feathers of her throat.
We climbed up the artificial Mount St. Gothard. It was set round with turf-banks and leafy niches; an oak stood on its summit by way of crown. Man (day-fly, as he is, playing above a ripple of time) cannot do without watches and date-indicators on the banks of the time-stream. Although every day is a birthday and a new year’s day, he must have one of his own into the bargain. Thirty-eight minutes struck in us. And down from the waves of throbbing blue above us came floating a broad breath of breeze, rocking the swelling grapes and the bare grafts, the delicate young branchlets, and the strong, sharp-pointed winter-corn, and lifting the soaring pigeons higher in their flight. The sun, above Switzerland, looked, in blissful intoxication, at his own face reflected in the sublime glittering ice-mirror of Mont Blanc, parting (unaware) day and night into equal halves, as if with two arms of fate, and throwing down equal portions to every land and every eye. We sang Goethe’s “Hymn to the Spring.” The sun sent us down (like dew) from the hill-top to the valley—the earth swelling loose fell rustling at our feet; and wine (Lethe of life) hid from our sight the misty bunks within which it rolled its way—mirroring only heaven and flowers. Clotilda said (not to us, but to her Luna)—(and here, dear Cato, I am drank with remembering; and I beg, accordingly, to invite you, at once, for the 10th of April), “Ah! dearest, how beautiful the world is sometimes. We ought not to think so poorly of it. Are we not like Orestes in the ‘Iphigenia’—fancying we are in exile, though we really are in our own native land.”
With every downward step from the hill we sank back into the workaday marsh-meadow of life. “What the better are we,” cried Melchior, quite angrily, “for all this splendour in and around us, when to-morrow a single passionate earthquake may hurl down an avalanche of snow-masses upon all that is warm and blooming in us? it is the April of the human heart—not the April of the universe—that causes me such vexation. We are always at our hardest just after an attendrissement—and moved to tears just after some murderous rage—as earthquakes set warm springs flowing. Now I know quite well that, to-morrow, at the sitting of the council, I shall attack and oppose everybody and everything. Pitiable! pitiable! And you are not a whit better, Flamin.”
“Not a whit,” said Flamin, with touching candour. Luna and my wife took the Professor’s wife between them (each taking one of her children in her lap), and sat down upon the green nether slope of the hill, on the sunny side of the nightingale. We, however, were too restless to sit down. “Alas!” (said Jean Paul, walking up and down, with his hands folded and hanging, and his hat thrown away, so that his eyes, at all events, might be higher and freer). “Alas! is any one a whit better? We take a vow of universal love to our fellow men whenever we are deeply touched—when we have buried some one, or have been thoroughly happy, or have committed some grand transgression, or looked long and closely at Nature, or are intoxicated with love, or some earthly form of intoxication: but we are really only perjurers, not philanthropists, as we fancy ourselves. We long and thirst for the love of others—but it is like mercury, it feels and looks like fountain water, and flows and glitters like it—but it is cold, dry, and heavy in reality. It is just those very people upon whom Nature has bestowed most gifts (and who, consequently, should not covet other people’s, but be content with distributing their own), who, like princes, demand the more from their fellow men the more they have to give them, and the less they do give them. Dissensions are the more bitterly painful, the more alike the souls are between whom they take place, just as discords are harsher the nearer they approach the unison. We forgive without reason because we have found fault without reason, for a rightful and righteous anger must, of necessity, be everlasting. Nothing is a stronger evidence of the miserable subordination of our reason to our ruling passion than the fact that we place such a flat every-day matter as time among the cures for hate, grief, love, &c.; our impulses are to forget to conquer, or to grow tired of doing so—our wounds are to be sanded over with the Margrave’s sympathetic powder of drift-sand out of Time’s sand-glass! Too miserable a business altogether! But can anything make a better of it? Certainly, least of all my complaints of it!”
“The fact is,” said the serene, gentle, Professor (who only uses a very few pedantic tints in his style of painting), “feelings of love to our fellow men70 are useless without reasons.” “So are reasons without feelings,” said Paul.
“Consequently,” continued the Professor (for I could not manage to get my Piqueur brought to bear anyhow, but had to keep him idly in reserve), “the two have to be combined like genius and criticism—of which the former can produce only master-pieces and scholar-pieces, the latter only something of an everyday sort between the two. What I think is, that our lack of love arises, not from our coldness, but from a conviction that others do not deserve it. The coldest of men would acquire a greater warmth of feeling for their fellows if they acquired a higher opinion of them.”
“But,” asked Clotilda, “must we not forgive even the wrong done by our enemies? The right is not matter for forgiveness.”
“Of course it is not,” he answered, but would let himself be no further diverted from his point. “The only ugliness and hatefulness which we can truly experience hatred for is that of a moral sort.”
“In opposition to that view of the question,” said Jean Paul, “I might adduce the fierce combats of animals, and nurseries in a state of war; for in neither of these cases is there any idea of immorality of the enemy, although hatred of him exists. But were I to adduce these cases, I could answer myself—at least, so so. If we directed our hatred against things other than the immoral, we should be just as angry with the hanging branch which strikes us in the face as with the person who broke it so that it should be so placed as to do so. The rage of a chastised child is quite a different thing from the alarmed instinct of self-conservancy—the feeling of avoidance of nitric acid, or of bodily hurt. The former has in it a duplex sense of dislike, the two components of which are most dissimilar—the one referring to the cause, the other to the effect. We must distinguish between beings which are capable of morality, and such as are not, in kind—not in degree; those incapable of morality can never be made capable of it by the mere lapse of time, or step by step. Whence, if children at any period of their age were utterly non-moral beings, it would follow that they could never, at any period, begin to become moral beings. In brief, their anger is nothing other than a dim sense of other people’s injustice. As to the animals, I don’t know what else to say than that there must be in them something analogous to our moral sense. Those who (like us) believe them to have immortal souls, must, as a matter of course, concede them some beginnings some pre-existent germs of morality—although these may be overpowered and kept in the background by their animal natures even to a greater extent than (for instance) conscience is in sleep, drunkenness, or insanity. But alas! all this is night within night! And I hope this obscurity will be considered some excuse, Professor, for the manner in which I have obstructed and built out your light.”
“Now,” he went on, “since hatred only concerns itself with moral defects, how strange it is that we never hate ourselves, even for the gravest moral defects.”
“I think,” said Flamin, “that one does sometimes feel the deadliest hatred of one’s self, for over-haste.”
“And then,” said Jean Paul, “your argument would apply just as well to love—at least it would half apply. Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”
“We never hate ourselves,” I said. “We despise and pity ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—I must add this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?” “Self-hatred,” went on the Professor, “is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it—i. e., a desire to punish, not for bettering’s sake, but for punishing’s. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely a disguised desire for bettering—i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concede rapidity of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people’s errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now.”
His own wife here interrupted him with the words, “My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy—such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account.”
“No, I suppose not,” he went on. “The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same ‘better nature’ does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds—his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, its untender satisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a smaller thing than sympathy). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy’s skin, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in his heart.” “Ah!” said Luna, “how can that be possible?” “I don’t think it would be possible,” Clotilda answered her, “if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body.”
“Exactly,” said the Professor; “that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment they acknowledged their fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” said Melchior. “The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty.”
“And yet, after all,” I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), “if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain, I feel quite certain I couldn’t throw one of them in—at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging—say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones.”
“You see, you won’t allow me to speak,” the Professor broke in. “I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our hatred, being an emotion, always turns every action into a whole life; every attribute into a personality (or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of seeing any personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) converts one attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking—of friendship—that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the converse transformation takes place—that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them—neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the individuality of the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a wholly wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself one goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another.”
“Ah! how delightful,” said Luna, “that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether.”
“You see,” he continued, “it cannot be the me of a person that we hate; for the me is still the same me when it improves, and wins our regard.”
In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other’s head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race—ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, which ought to produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should make too strong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.
Paul pointed to the second of these distorting mirrors—our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which they take cognizance of—his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.
Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. “Who is to save us from these bodily senses?” I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, “I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart.”
Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. “I,” he said, “have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I’ve got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid’s bucket for happiness—safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ‘Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,’ I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ‘how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.’ But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul—like an evening moth—out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me.”
“To picture one’s enemy to one’s self as unclothed, or disembodied,” said I, “so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operation I perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back.”
And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: “But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world’s Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?”
Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor’s wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.
While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.
“I asked you once or twice before dinner,” I commenced, “who can invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I’m afraid I’ve made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur’s life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me—not to prescribe for him, but—to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, ‘You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I’m not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It’s but little that I have ever thought of scraping together for myself, and that is a comfort to think on now. It’s for the poor that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it’s a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back again elsewhere. But there’s one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She’s an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask you to go through the house with the notary (I don’t trust him a bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I’ve left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.’
“A man whose stubble Death is in the very act of turning up with his plough, has, upon me, a more powerful claim than that of the first request—that of the last. I came the next day, bringing with me the notary, and also my dislike to the dying man and his distrustful suspicions. With gay indifference I helped to protocol the effects in the sick-room—his shooting-jacket, worn into shining patches by his old game-bag—his old guns and knives—even such matters as a leather over-shoe for his thumb, and a long mummy bandage for his nose, which he had worn on occasions when he had hurt himself in these members with his gun.
“As we went through the other silent chambers—empty snail-shells of his shrivelled, dried-up life—my frozen blood began to thaw within me, and to move in warm, light mercury-globules. But when I came to the lumber-room, with the notary, and tuned over the rag-fair of his old night-shirts—(caterpillar cases and blood-shirts of his feverish nights, in which I seemed still to see him groaning and thirsting)—and his Pathebrief,71 and his name copied from thence with all its flourishes on to his pointer’s collar—and the picture of his pretty mother with him as a smiling infant in her lap—and his wife’s bridal garland of wire, covered with green silk—(Oh! for goodness’ sake do not interrupt me with talk—I’ve had enough of that, Heaven knows). When I took in my hands these opera-costumes, these theatrical properties, in which the sick player down-stairs had performed his probe-rolle72 of a Harpaxus for the benefit of the poor—not only did the poor fellow’s moral emptiness of treasury, and miserable rate of monthly salary, strike me with pain, but, moreover, I wished him no heavier suffering, no severer punishment, than he would wish for himself, were he really to repent in good earnest before his plunge into the depths of the soil. No, not so much, for the matter of that. Therefore, my dislike to him was gone. For I put myself in his place—not outwardly only, as people generally do, fancying themselves in another person’s physical place with their own souls, their own wishes, habitudes, &c.—but inwardly—in his mind, his youth, wishes, sufferings, thoughts.
“‘Poor Piqueur,’ I said, as I went down-stairs; ‘I have no more satiric pleasure now over your gnawing suspicion, your errors, your self-shooting covetousness, your hungry avarice. You have got to live through a long eternity with that self, that “me” of yours, the best way you can, just as I have with mine. You have got to rise with that self of yours at the Resurrection, and go about with it, and look after it, and care for its welfare. And, of course, you can’t but be fond of yourself, just as I am of myself, and put up with all that self’s defects and shortcomings whether you will or not. Go in peace then into the other world, where the broken glasses of your harmonica of life will be replaced with fresh-tuned ones—in the great home of all the spirits!’
“The old woman met us on the stairs crying out that the man was dying. I went to his bed-side, looked upon his cold, yellow, senseless form, and saw that he would very soon throw off his last stage-dress, his body. Next day the tolling bell announced that, he had returned to the dust—gone back into the ground—that, stage dressing-room of souls and flowers. (And we are rung off and on to that stage, as well as others.)
“Meanwhile I made an experiment with my modified and mildened system of treatment, upon the poor notary devil; the day after I tried it on the jurists who came from the college. (Jean Paul! communicate your idea to us by-and-bye—do not interrupt me just now)—I did this, I say, and found that I was able to establish a heart-peace even with the plebeians among them—who dishonour their calling—the only really free one in all the body politic. For in the cases of these lawyers, and those of my own medical colleagues from whose breasts I have been so often in such a hurry to cut off, and melt down, the medals of honour which they have cast for themselves, I have had merely to take away the roof from over their heads, lift the rafters from their walls, and bare their houses to the four winds of heaven. Then I could look in and see everything there—their housekeeping, their unoffending wives, their sleep (i. e., mock-death), sicknesses, sorrows, birth-days, and funeral-days, and this reconciled me to them! Of a truth, to love a man, I have only to think of his children, his parents—the love he feels and inspires. One can easily perform this philanthropic transmigration of soul at any moment, without help of the balloon of phantasy, or the diving-bell of profound reflection. Good heavens! it does seem hard (and a shame and disgrace into the bargain) that it should have taken me thirty years of my life to understand properly what it is that self-love is really driving at—my own and everybody else’s—what it wants is, to be surrounded with mere repetitions of its own ‘me.’ It insists upon every infant on earth being a parson’s son (as I am)—that everybody shall have lost, and gained, noble friends—that everybody shall be an M.D., and have studied at Göttingen—that his name shall be Sebastian, and that he shall be an overseer of mines, and write his life in forty-five dog-post-days—in brief, that this world shall contain a thousand million Victors instead of one. I beg that everybody may send spies into his soul, to look carefully about them and see whether it be not the case that there are thousands of instances in which what we hate a man for is, either that he is as fat as a prize pig, or as lean as a stick of vermicelli—or that he is a district secretary, or a Roman Catholic watchman in Augspurg, and wears a coat white on the one side, and green on the other—or that he eats his veal with melted butter;73 (or, at all events, hate them more for these reasons; for when we are indifferent to people, all their external characteristics, beautiful or ugly, merely increase our indifference). People are so deep sunk in their dear selves that everybody yawns at the menu of everybody else’s favourite dishes, but expects them to be interested when he reads out his to them.”
That feathered echo, the nightingale, was singing to us phrases of the music of the spheres, to us inaudible until thus repeated to us by her. But I had my rapid descent from my Mont Cenis to finish, and could but give utterance to my applause (of the bird and her music) by a hasty nod. “Heavenly! Elysian! I’ve been hearing it every now and then. But, one thing more. Since my sentimental journey in other people’s souls, I have been happier and fatter than I used to be, in ball-rooms, anterooms, and large assemblages (hot lark-spits which roasted all the fat out of a Swift). This enduring of transgressors includes a greater enduring still of fools and dunces, although the great world makes war on these three tolerated sects in just the contrary ratio.
“The amnesty thus granted to humanity makes the duty of loving more easy to perform; moreover, it renders the deep blissfulness of friendship and love more justifiable; for the glow, the fire of the latter often vitrifies and calcines the heart towards the rest of mankind. And this is the reason why the last and best fruit....”
Clotilda looked inquiringly here, as if begging to be allowed one word of remonstrance with me for forgetting to put myself in the place of those whose transformation I was thus extolling. I reddened, and paused. “This,” observed Jean Paul, “is the reason why a concert-room audience cries out the loudest against noise or disturbance just during the loveliest adagios—when people are most deeply touched—and swear and weep at the same time.”
“I cannot help being ashamed of an experience of my own,” said Clotilda. “The other day I cried so at reading Silly’s letters (in Allwill’s Papers) that I was obliged to put the book down. Then I went to the casino with my head full of what I had been reading—and I dare not tell you what hard opinions I entertained, several times that very evening, of several people of my acquaintance. I expected of them that they should all be in exactly the same mood of mind as myself—although, of course, they had not just come from reading Silly’s letters.”
“That is exactly what I was coming to,” concluded I. “The last and best fruit, which ripens late in a soul ever warm, is tenderness towards the hard—patience with the impatient—kindly feeling for the selfish—and philanthropy towards the misanthropic.”
It is a very odd thing, beloved Cato, but Jean Paul has just come and told me a murder-tale of human iniquity, which goes hissing through my heart like a red-hot iron. All my theories stand bright and clear as stars around my soul, but I can do nothing save look inactively down upon the billows in which my blood is foaming, heated by this subterranean earth-fire, and wait until they cool down and subside. Alas! we poor, poor mortals! Jean Paul, who knew the story the day before yesterday, and had consequently all that time to put the cooling process in practice in advance of me, is going to take charge of the picture exhibition of our insular flower-pieces in my stead, and add a postscript to this. Which is well, for to-day I really could not do it. By the 10th of April the air will have cooled; then you are sure to be coming, as the French election meetings begin then. We must keep the “settling weeks” of your great feast and fairtide here. Alas! in what a disquiet condition have I to stop writing to you. You will go on reading, but not
Your
Victor.