Consumption.--Funeral Sermon in the Church of the
Still Land.--Ottomar.
It were perhaps even better for me, if I should endeavor to overtake
the two travelers less with the pen than on foot. The reading world can
now feast and junket on my things, while I await, with a cough, the
Easter fair, because while at work upon these things as I sat crooked
up at the writing-desk, I have written a fine, full-formed hectic case
into the two lobes of my lungs. Not one of the whole public says to me,
Thank you! that I have by thought and emotion deprived myself of my
healthy breathing and my _sedes_: almost everything about me is shut
up, and by reason of the double _blockade_ little can in either of two
opposite directions _pass_ through me. I trudge along behind the
plough-shares of the Auenthalers, in order to inhale the steam of the
furrows, as the best British hectic patients do,[73] as a remedy
for my air-stoppage and other stoppages. Nevertheless the simple
public, in whose service I have made myself so miserable, would
laugh at me if they should see me stalking like a crow after the
ploughing oxen. Is that justice?--Must I not besides sleep all night
between the arms of two poodles, whom I propose to infect with my
consumption, like a married man of rank? But am I then, when I have by
morning-and-evening-presents endowed the two bedfellows with my malady,
myself rid of the _malum_, or does not rather M. Nadan de la
Richebaudiere tell me I must buy and infect new dogs, because half a
canine menagerie is needed as the lighter of a single man? In this way
I may spend my whole pay upon mere dogs. I will even worry down the
injury which my honesty suffers in the matter, because I must show
myself as friendly toward the poor sucking dogs, whose lungs I propose
to lame and cripple, as great folks do toward the victims of their
salvation.
Meanwhile _this_ is still the most annoying scandal, that I am at this
present in a--cow-barn: for this (according to modern Swedish books) is
said to furnish a dispensary and seaport against short breath. Mine has
not yet, however, shown a disposition to grow longer, though I have
been sitting here for three Trinities and given the world three long
sections (as if so many Joseph's-children) at the birthplace of much
stupider beings. One must himself have labored at such a place for
consumption's sake in the juristic or aesthetic departments (and I am
both belles-lettrist and counsellor at law) to know from experience,
that there, oftentimes, the most tolerable ideas have much _stronger
voices_ against them than those of the literary and legal judges, and
are thereby consigned to the devil.
While Fenk and Gustavus were working off in their journey more sorrow
than money, although they did not stay away so long as all my filed
papers, Oefel also went on, namely in his romantic Grand Sultan, and
painted in with the greatest delight the affliction of his friend.
Oefel thanked God for every misfortune, which would go into a verse,
and he wished that, in order to the flourishing of polite literature,
pestilence, famine and other horrors occurred oftener in Nature, so
that the poet might work after these models, and thereby secure a
greater illusion, as already the painters, who would paint beheaded
people or blown up vessels, have had the archetypes fly to their
assistance. As it was, however, he often had to be, for want of
Academies, his own Academy, and was once compelled, for a whole day, to
have virtuous emotions, because the like were to be depicted in his
work--nay, often, he was compelled, for the sake of a single chapter,
to go several times into B----, [Baireuth] which annoyed him
exceedingly.
With other people also it fares just so; the object of knowledge
remains no longer an object of feeling. The injuries under which the
man of honor overflows and boils, are to the jurist a proof, a gloss,
an illustration for the Pandect-title of injuries. The hospital
physician calmly repeats, at the bedside of the patient over whom
the flames of fever are raging and roaring, the few clippings
from his clinic which may suit the case. The officer who, on the
battle-field--the butcher's-block of humanity--strides away over
mangled men, is thinking only of the evolutions and quarter-wheelings
of his school of cadets, who were needed to cut out whole generations
into physiognomic fragments. The battle-painter, who goes behind him,
thinks and looks, indeed, upon the mangled men and upon every wound
exposed to view there; but he is bent upon copying all for the
Dusseldorf gallery, and the purely human feeling of this misery he only
awakens by and by, through his battle-piece, in others and perhaps also
in--himself. Thus does every kind of science spread a stony crust over
our hearts, not the philosophic alone.
Beata almost sacrificed her eyes to the intense interest which she felt
in no one else (as she thought) than the one who had gone hence. Her
heavy looks were often turned toward the hermitage-mountain; at evening
she herself visited it, and brought to the sleeper the last offering
which friendship has then to give, in overmeasure. Thus, then, do the
fangs of misfortune strike into tender hearts the most deeply; thus are
the tears which man sheds so much the greater and swifter the less the
earth can give him and the higher he stands above it, as the cloud
which hangs higher than others over the earth, sends down the biggest
drops. Nothing raised Beata up but the redoubling of the alms which she
gave certain poor people weekly or after every pleasure, and her
solitary intercourse with the Resident Lady, with her Laura and the two
children of the gardener.
The two travelers were better off. As Doctor Fenk visited, _ex-officio_,
the government physicians, who made medicines, together with the
apothecaries, who employed reprisals and made receipts, he fortunately
was so often vexed that he had no convenient season for indulging grief;
in this way government physicians, who were always in the country
(except just when epidemics happened to be prevalent), and midwives, who
in extreme baptism still better provide for the regeneration of young
non-Christians than for their birth, and whom Pharaoh ought to have
had,--these two classes brought the afflicted Pestilentiary in some
measure upon his legs again. Anger is so grand a purgative of sorrow,
that legal persons, who seal and inventory for widows and orphans,
cannot vex them enough; hence I shall hereafter leave by will to my
heirs, whom my death will too sorely afflict, nothing but the remedy
for that affliction--exasperation at the deceased!
At last the two came back with mutually opposite emotions, and their
way led them by the resting-place, the manor of Ottomar and near the
orphaned temple of the park. The temple, however, was lighted; it was
far into the night. Around the temple hung a buzzing bee-swarm of
hunting-dresses, in which were encased half the Court. Fenk and
Gustavus elbowed their way therefore through greater and greater
personages and horses, swept like comets by one star after another, and
into the church: therein were one or two unexpected things--the Prince
and a dead body--for the fighting thing behind at the altar was nothing
unexpected, but the parson. Gustavus and Fenk had ensconced themselves
in the confessional. Gustavus could hardly tear his eye away from the
Prince, who, with that look of noble indifference which is seldom
wanting in people of _ton_ or from large cities and funeral-bidders,
glanced far over the dead man--the Prince had that heart peculiar to
the great folk, which is a petrifaction in the good sense, and is
with them the first among their solid parts, and which betrays in the
finest manner that they hold to the immortality of the soul, and that
when they have one of their own connection buried, they are not at
home--[are out of their element.]
All at once the Doctor laid his head upon the cushion of the
confessional and covered his face; he stood up again and gazed with
an eye which he could not keep dry, toward the uncovered corpse and
sought in vain to see. Gustavus also looked that way and the form was
known to him, but not the name, which he vainly asked of the speechless
Doctor--at last the funeral preacher named the name. I need not, as if
for the first time, say in double-black-letter, that the dead man on
whom just now so many hard eyes and a pair of disconsolate ones rested,
looked just like the Player Reinecke, whose noble figure also the heavy
grave-stone crushes into confusion. I need not repeat after the pastor
the name of _Ottomar_. The poor Doctor seemed for some time to have
been determined that the anguish of his nerves should resolve itself
into a _nervous preparation_, and was practising in that direction.
Singularly enough, Gustavus took no interest in the dead, but only in
the mourning friend.
The good Medical Counsellor shut to with a violent slam the hymn-book
which lay in his hands; he heard not when the Prince, (who had been
there only three minutes) rode away to get the death-certificate, but
every word of the pastor he caught, for the sake of learning something
of the history of his friend's last sickness; but he learned nothing
except the cause of his death (burning fever). At last all was over,
and he walked mutely and with staring eyes in between the funeral
torches and up to the bier, shoved aside with his left hand without
look or sound whatever might hinder him, and clutched at the sleeper's
with his right. When at last he once held in his grasp the hand which
Alps and years had torn from his, without however being any nearer to
him for whom he had so long yearned, and without the joy of reunion,
then did his anguish grow dense and dark, and spread heavily and
formlessly over his whole soul. But when he found again on that hand
two warts, which he had so often felt in grasping it, then did his
sorrow assume the veiled form of the past; Milan passed before him with
the bloom of its vineyards and the summits of its chestnut-trees and
the lovely days spent among both, and looked mournfully on the two men,
to whom nothing was left. And now he would have fallen with his two
streaming eyes on the two that were dry, if the undertaker had not
said: "One does not like to do that, it is not well." A lock was all
the grave gave back of the whole friend of whom it had robbed him, a
lock which for the eye is so little and for the touch of the finger so
much. He tenderly laid down again the hand which had so sadly closed
the last letter, upon the untouched one and took a last leave of his
Ottomar for this world.
He had not observed that the dead man's Pomeranian dog and two tonsured
strangers were there, one of whom had six fingers.--Once out of the
church and on the road, one branch of which ran toward the palace of
Ottomar and the other around the hermitage-mountain, Gustavus and Fenk
looked upon each other with a mute, inconsolable inquiry--they answered
each other by a leave-taking. The Doctor turned about and continued his
journey--Gustavus went into the park and there at the foot of
hermitage-mountain, reflected upon the fate--not of his friend, nor his
own, but--that of all men....
And when am I writing this? On this 16th day of November, which is the
baptismal day of the encoffined Ottomar.