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!