"Thy letter, my dear youth, came duly to hand. I praise thy tears and
flames, which alternately sustain, instead of extinguishing each other.
Only become something, much, too, but not everything, in order that
thou mayest be able, in so extremely empty a thing as life is--(I
should be glad to know who invented it)--to hold out for all the
desolateness. A Homer, an Alexander, who have at length vanquished the
whole world and got it under them, must needs be plagued often with the
most tiresome and annoying hours, because their life, from being a
bride, has now become a wife. Much as I had palisaded and fortified
myself against that, in order not to mount over everybody's head, and
sit up top as Factotum of the world; I nevertheless, after all, came
out at last, unobserved and all standing, on the summit, merely
because, under my long contemplation, the whole circle of the earth,
full of foam-mountains and cloud-giants, had been melting down lower
and lower and crawling together; and now I gazed alone and dry-shod
down from my mountain-peak, wholly possessed with the bloodsuckers of
disgust at the world.
"Brother, it has changed, however, during this year, and I am afloat.
For that reason a long, and to me quite tiresome, letter is written
thee here in February, which shall tell thee about my approaching
grub- and chrysalis-state, where and how; for when I am once a shining
chrysalis, then I can only feebly stir and show myself any longer.
"I will explain myself _more_ clearly,--the Germans add, when they have
explained themselves clearly. It fits and hits most luckily--which I
prize as much as another--that precisely the end of the year is the end
of the paternal property upon which I have thus far lived, and
consequently, if Amsterdam ceases to pay, I also fail, and have nothing
more on hand than weak, chiromantic prophecies, and nothing in my body
except my stomach. I would I could still live by my navel, as in my
earlier times, and make myself such a soft bed.
"What, then, shall I do? As to accepting presents from my lords, men,
year out and year in, I do not respect them enough for that; and the
few, whom one does somewhat respect upon occasions, must in their turn
respect me too highly to make such an offer. What! shall I be a flea,
attached to the thinnest little golden chain, and a gentleman who has
fastened me by it, that I may spring with him but not away from him,
shall draw me up now and then upon his arm and say, 'Suck away, my
little creature!' Devil! I will remain free upon so contemptible an
earth,--no salary will I take, no orders in this great servants'
apartment,--sound to the core, so as not to awaken any sympathy or any
house-doctor,--yes, if one should knock off to me the heart of the
Countess Romeiro on the condition of my kneeling down to it, I would
take the heart, indeed, and kiss it, but immediately thereupon get up
and run away (either into the new world or the next) before she had
time to recapitulate the matter to herself and bring it before me.
"As to being something, and thereby earning in proportion, that I
could, if one should propose it to me, of course undertake, without any
special forfeiture of freedom and disparity. In fact, I see here from
my centre three hundred and sixty roads radiate, and I hardly know how
to choose among them, so that one would choose rather to flatten out
the centre into a circumference, or to seek to draw the latter into the
former, so as only to continue standing upon it. _Serving_, as the
staff-officers of the regiments say, were, to be sure, next to
commanding. Thou wilt thyself, as thou writest, take the field. (I have
duly received thy letter, and found therein thy shyness and passion all
right and good, and thyself entire.) And, in truth, if the Archangel
Michael were to array a holy legion, a _legio fulminatrix_ of some weak
Septuagints, against the commonwealth of the world,--were he to
proclaim a giant war against the domineering populace, in order to
drive four or five quarters of the world out of the world or into
prison by a sixth (on an island there would be good room for it), and
to make all spiritual slaves bodily ones,--be assured, in that happy
case I would plant myself foremost in the van, and would bring on
the cannon, with the short, flying remark, that, as Handel first
introduced cannon into music, so here for the first time, inversely,
they were bringing music into cannon. When we at length came back in a
body,--when the holy militia again swept hitherward,--then would God's
throne stand upon the earth, and holy men, with lofty fires in their
hands, should go up, much less to rule therefrom the world's body than
to sacrifice to the soul of the worlds.
"With the flower of France, then, thou wilt, as thou writest, for thy
individual self, for one man, hereafter stand up. Of course it is hard
for me to think highly of five and twenty millions, of which it is true
the cubic root must have grown and run up freely, but stem and twig
have, after all, for whole centuries, been drying and withering in a
slave's dungeon. He who was not, before the Revolution, a silent
Revolutionist,--somewhat as Chamfort was, against whose fire-proof
breast I once in Paris struck fire with mine, or like Montesquieu and
J. J. Rousseau,--let him not, with his silly spatterings, spread
himself out far beyond his house-door. Freedom, like everything
godlike, is not learned and acquired, but inborn. Of course, all
over France and Germany there sit young authors and sons of the
muses, who admire and proclaim their own sudden worth, only they are
cursedly astonished that they had not earlier felt their sense of
freedom,--soft, sickly knaves, who look upon themselves as complete
blowing whales, because they have found some bone or other of the said
fish, and buckled it to their ribs. I should always, in a war such as
these dead times can furnish, believe that I was fighting against
fools, indeed, but for fools too.
"The cynical, naive, free nature's-men of the present day--Franks and
Germans--are almost like the naked honorables, whom I have seen bathing
in the Pleisse, Spree, and Saale. They were, as was said, very naked,
white, and natural, and savages, but the black cue-tail of culture fell
down over their white backs. Some great, tall men, and fathers of their
times, like Rousseau, Diderot, Sidney, Ferguson, Plato, have laid aside
their worn-out breeches, and their disciples have taken them and worn
them, and because they sat so wide, long, and open upon their
diminutive bodies, have called themselves _sansculottes_ (men without
breeches).
"Truly, instead of the sword, I could also very well grasp the
penknife, and, as writing Cæsar, rise, to better the world, and be
useful to it, and use it. I shall always remember the conversation
which I once held upon this subject with a universal German librarian
of Berlin, as we walked quietly up and down in the menagerie. 'Every
one should surely enrich his native land with his talents, which else
would lie buried,' said the German librarian. 'To constitute a native
land, it is necessary, first and foremost, that there should be some
_land_,' said I. 'The Maltese librarian, however, who here speaks,
first saw the light at sea under a pitch-black storm. Of knowledge I
possess, of course, enough, and know that one has it, like a glassful
of cow-pock rationally taken, only to inoculate one's self withal. The
scholar, for his part, only swallows it again, in order to give it out
from himself, and so it goes on. Thus does the light, like the
glimmering brand in the game, "Kill the Fox, and Sell the Skin," pass
from hand to hand, until, however, to be sure, the brand goes out in
one,--mine,--and there remains.'
"'Droll enough!' said the universal German librarian. 'With such a
humor as this only connect the study of bad men and good models, and
then you create for us a second Rabener, to scourge fools.' 'Sir,'
replied I, in a rage, 'I should prefer to transfer the first blow to
the backs of the wise ones and you. Philosophers suffer themselves to
be enlightened and washed, have always their insight into things, and
are good fools, and just my people. Let a man like a universal German
farrier, who takes the pulse of the muses' horse, holds his out to me,
and I will feel it with great pleasure. But the rest and refuse of the
world, sir? Who can skim off the world sea, if he does not break away
its banks? Is it not a sorrow and a shame that all men of genius, from
Plato even to Herder, have become noisy, and die printed, and
frequently read and studied by the learned rabble and custom-house,
without having the least power to change them? Librarian, call and
whistle out, I pray you, all that lies in the critical dog-kennels on
the watch beside those temples, and ask the whole body of greyhounds,
bulldogs, and boar-hounds whether anything else is stirring in their
souls than a potentiated maw, instead of a poetic and holy heart? In
the mountain-cauldron they see the pudding-pot and brewer's-kettle, in
the leaves the spades[112] on the play-cards, and the thunder has for
them, as a greater electric spark, a very sour taste, which it
afterward infuses into the March beer.'
"'Do you mean any allusion?' he asked. 'Assuredly!' said I. 'But
further, Librarian, suppose we too were so lucky as to turn on our
heels, and, with one whirl of a breath, to blow over all fools, as if
they were infected with an arsenical fume, and lay them dead as a
mouse: I cannot see, for all that, where the blessing is coming out,
because, besides that we are still standing before each other, and have
to breathe on ourselves too, I see, in all corners round about, women
sitting, who will hatch the slain world anew.'
"'My dear fellow, best pair of bellows,[113] full of fire,' I
continued, 'can this, however, call and stamp one very strongly to be
of the satirical handicraft? O no! This is genuine humor with me,
perhaps strange madness, also, perhaps--but O, will not the rare
joke-maker, even in your uncommon library, resemble the porcupine-man
in London (the son) who had the office under the beast-dealer, Brook,
of acting as Cicerone to the stranger among the wild stock and through
the park of outlandish beasts, and who commenced on the threshold with
the observation that he showed himself as one of the species man?
Consider it coolly and first of all! I still swing my satirical
horsetail loosely and merrily, and perhaps against an occasional
horse-fly; but let a book be tied to it, as in Poland they tie a cradle
to the cow's tail, and the beast shall rock the cradle of the readers
and give pleasure; the tail, however, becomes a slave.'
"'To such images,' said the Librarian, 'sure enough, the cultivated
world could never be accustomed by any Rabener or Voltaire, and I now
perceive myself that satire is not your department.' 'O, most true!'
replied I, and we parted on very good terms.
"But to take things seriously, brother, what is there now left for a
man (in the shape of prospects as well as of wishes) to whom the age is
so over-salted and so bitter and briny as it is to me, and to whom life
is made so by living men,--who is annoyed to death with the universal
insipid hypocrisy and the glistening polish of the most poisonous
wood,--and the horrible commonness of the German life-theatre, and the
still greater commonness of the German theatre-life,--and the Pontine
marshes of infamous and immoral Kotzebuean weakliness, which no Holy
Father can drain and make into sound land,--and the murdered pride,
together with the living vanity, that stalk about, so that I, only for
the sake of drawing breath, can betake myself for whole hours to the
plays of children and of cattle, because there I am assured, at least,
that neither of them are coquetting with me, that, on the contrary,
they have nothing in mind and are in love with nothing but their
work,--what is there left, I asked at the top of this page, for one in
whose nostrils, as was said, so many sorts of things stink, and
especially this further particular, that improvement is hard, but
deterioration not so by any means, because even the best do somewhat
impose upon the worst, and thereby on themselves too, and because with
their secret cursings of the age, and trimming and truckling to it,
they dance at least for gold and glory, and in consideration thereof
willingly let themselves be used by the more steady mass, as wine-casks
are used for meat-barrels,--what is there, friend, I say, for a man in
times when, as now, one makes in print, not _black white_, indeed, but
yet gray, and where one, as good catechists must, always avoids
precisely the question, yes or no,--what remains except hatred of
tyrants and slaves at once, and indignation at the maltreated no less
than at the maltreatment? And what shall a man to whom the armor of
life in such situations is worked thin or worn thin, seriously resolve
upon?"
I, for my part, if the question is about myself, resolved, half in
joke, upon inserting a fine-spun, lucid demand in the Imperial
Advertiser, which you perhaps have already read in Rome, without even
guessing the author.
"'TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
"'It may well be taken for _granted_, that a sound _understanding_ and
_reason_ (_mens sana in c. s._), _next_ to a clear conscience, holds
among the prizeworthy goods of life the _highest_ place,--a proposition
which I venture to assume as an axiom with the readers of this paper.
As to what may further be said on the subject, as well by as against
Kantners, (so Campe writes it, and much more correctly, instead of
_Kantians_,) it does not certainly belong to an entirely _popular paper
for the people_ like this present. The undersigned is now in the
_sorry_ case that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of
Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your
answers; say _when_ he is to be (out with it before all Germany!!)
completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already
answered.
"'The _when_, but not the _whether_, it now lies with and upon noble
philanthropists to answer. Here are my reasons, Germans! Leaving out of
sight that many a reason might be deduced from the very publication of
this request,--which, to be sure, decides little,--the following items
are noticeable and sure:--1. The motley style of the author itself,
which is to be known less from this insertion (composed at very
considerable intervals) than from the similarity between his style and
that of a very favorite and tasteless writer,[114] which, denoting a
gay exuberance of the most wild and strange images in the head,
betokens an approaching _crack_, as does a motley play of colors upon
glass; 2. The prediction of a scamp,[115] of which he is always
thinking,--a circumstance which must have bad effects; 3. His love and
study of Swift, whose madness is no novelty to the learned; 4. His
complete loss of memory; 5. His frequent bad trick of confounding
things dreamed of with things really experienced, and _vice versa_; 6.
His misfortune not to know what he writes till he has read it over
afterward, because he now leaves out something bearing upon his
subject, or again puts in something that has nothing to do with it, as
the crossed and blotted manuscript unfortunately best proves; 7. His
whole previous life, all his thinking and joking, the details under
which head it would be tedious here to specify; and, 8. His most
unreasonable dreams. Now the question is, _when_, in such circumstances
(that is to say, if no fevers, or cases of love intervene), complete
distraction (_idea fixa_, _mania_, _raptus_) comes on. With Swift it
fell very late, in old age, when he might already, besides, have been
naturally half foolish, and only showed it more afterward. When one
considers that Professor Busch once reckoned that his weakness of sight
might very well grow upon him from year to year without any serious
consequence, because the period of complete blindness fell quite out
beyond the end of his whole life, merely upon his grave, so must I
assume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have
no occasion for any other _petites maisons_ than the coffin itself; so
that I might, in the mean time, have married and held an office as well
as any other honest man.
"'My object in this communication is simply to bring myself into
correspondence on the subject with some philanthropist or other (he
must be, however, a philosophical physician!). My address may be had at
the office of the Imperial Advertiser. I make myself, perhaps, more
clearly known, bodily and civilly, in this very paper, in the column
where I inquire after a wife.
"'Pestitz, February. S----s, L----d, L----r, G----l, S----e.'[116]
"Albano, thou knowest under what bush my serious meaning lies hid. The
Advertiser of the Empire and of Schoppe has eight reasons for the
thing, which are not only my serious meaning, but my fun. Since the
Baldhead announced to me the rising of my mad-dog-star after a year, I
have always seen the aurora of this fixed star before me, and seen
myself thereupon blind and cowardly at last; I must speak it out. O I
had in January, brother, eight frightful dreams, one after another,
according to the number of reasons assigned in the Advertiser, and
themselves appertaining to the eighth,--dreams wherein a Wild Huntsman
of the brain went hunting through the mind, and a stream full of
worlds, full of faces, and mountains and hands, billowed along, bearing
all before it--I will not distress thee with the details,--Dante and
his head were heaven to it.
"Then I grew sullen about the matter of cowardice, and said to myself,
'Hast thou hitherto lived so long, and easily flung overboard the
richest cargoes, even this world and the next, and divested thyself so
clean of everything, even of glory and of books and of hearts, and kept
nothing but thyself, in order to stand up therewith free and naked and
cold on the ball of earth before the face of the sun, and now must thou
unexpectedly cringe before the mere crazy fixed thought of a crazy
fixed idea, which any stroke of a feverish pulse, any blow of a fist,
any grain of poison may stamp into thy head, and thus must thou throw
away at once thy old, godlike freedom?--Schoppe, I know not at all what
I am to think of thee! Whoso still fears anything in the universe, and
though it were hell itself, he is still a slave!
"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I
feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and
lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the
spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,--what they
call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for
example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other
things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in
the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually
sink,--into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off
against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,--where
man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm
and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a
philosopher, _makes_ everything that he _thinks_,--where he also draws
his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold
and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and
poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near
the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams
of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one,
the flying clouds into one great evening red.
"But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out
for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good
fixed idea,--for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims
and swarms before him,--otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were
still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to
find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall
deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first
man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or
the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin,
or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or
the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first
Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,[117] or, in fact, the
universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,--then, certainly,
my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But
what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand
open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a
beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I
see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased
person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey
into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy?
O can I not--for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of
themselves, make one childish--be an innocent child again, that plays
and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now
a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble
of life, and again sends out the drop through the pipe, blown up into a
glimmering little world-globe of colors?
"It is full midnight; I must now go to church, to hold my
vesper-devotions.
"Three weeks later.
"Nota Bene!
"I had been, since thy departure, in a manner damnably unlucky until
about one o'clock this morning. At two o'clock I took up my resolution;
I have just (at five) taken the pen; and at six, when I have drunken
myself full and written myself empty, I take my travelling cane, the
point of which, after two months, shall stand sticking in the Pyrenees.
O heavens! there must have been something thorny this long time
standing by me, which I so long took for a hedgehog, whereas it is the
best musical barrel full of pins, out of which I can get nothing less
(I turned it a few hours ago) than the best arrangement of flute-pipes,
unadulterated music of the spheres, and rotatory music for the
bravura-airs of the three men in the furnace, a whole living
Vaucanson's wooden flute-player, and unheard-of things wherewith the
machine blows till it bursts--not itself, but certain knaves, whereof
need I particularly name the Baldhead?
"O listen, youth! It concerns thee. I will now, for thy sake, be what
the world calls frank, namely, shameless, for verily I had rather
uncover my haunch than my heart, and am less red when I do so.
"There was, once on a time, in old times, a young time, one full of
fire and roses, when old Schoppe, for his part, was also young enough;
when the alert, contriving bird easily nosed out where the hare lay,
and the female hare, too; when the man could still put himself on good
terms with the well-known four quarters of the world; or else, just as
easily as a steer, thrust with his horn at every fly; when he (now a
silver pheasant of cool times) still strode or flew up and down through
all Italy as a warm gold pheasant, perched now on Buanorotti's Moses,
now on the Colosseum, now on Ætna, now on the dome of St. Peter's, and
crowed for joy, flapped his wings, and soared toward heaven.
"It was at this time that the still unpicked storm-bird, hovering one
day to and fro through the waterfalls of Tivoli, preciously blest, saw
there occasionally, suddenly, overhead, in Vesta's temple, for the
first time, nothing more than--the Princess di Lauria, afterward, I
conjecture, carried off by a Knight of the Fleece, as his golden
fleece. To see her,--to transform one's self from a storm-bird into a
cock-pigeon to the chariot of Venus; to tear one's self loose from team
and bridle; to fly before that goddess; to float round her in narrower
and narrower circles,--all this was not one thing, but three things. I
had first to grow and paint myself up into a bird of Paradise, in order
to fly into a Paradise; that is to say, I had to learn painting, in
order to be permitted her presence.
"When at length I had the portrait-pencil and profile-scissors in my
power, and one morning appeared with both before the Princess and the
old Prince, I had to paint and cut the Prince himself; his daughter had
already been married and secretly travelled off; for thy grandfather
(unlike others who prophesy their movements beforehand), prophesies his
only afterward, and opens his mouth merely to hear.
"I soon cut out the man,--packed up,--went out into all the world.
After nearly three years I stood again on the tenth terrace of Isola
Bella, quite unexpectedly, before the Countess Cesara. Heaven and hell!
what a woman was thy mother! She threw everybody into both of _those
places_ at once; I know not whether she did thy father, too. The writer
of this stood in his last ornithological transformation before her, as
silent pearl-cock (guinea-peacock), (tears must be the pearls), and got
a likeness of her after a few weeks.
"She had two children, thee--I clearly remember thy then already
sharpened contour--and thy sister, the so-called Severina. Thy father
was not there, but his wax image was, by which I instantly recognized
him eighteen years later in Rome. Thy sister, too, was repeated in wax;
only thou not. A wax figure, like thee at a distance, which illusively
prefigured thee as a man always held up before thee, the brother of thy
father, who was there, too, as a file-leader of thy future, saying,
'Here thou art, cubed beforehand, and already forced up into full size,
filled out from flask into cask,'--seeking thus to enkindle thee, so
that thou mightest grow up and be a man. They had a uniform put on
thee, like that which the wax man wore,--I know not of what sort. Then
didst thou, striding around thine own micromegas, boldly call him out,
out of the future into the present. Now thou knowest what thou hast
become, and mayst well, and with more right, look down in thy turn as
proudly upon the little one, as the little one formerly looked up to
the great one. I could never approve in thy uncle this machine for
spiritual ductility; besides, I have for all wax puppets such an
abominating, shuddering dread.
"My only object on the beautiful island was to get away from it, and
from the fair islander, so soon as I had painted her. 'Stupid century,'
said I, 'do I then want anything more of thee?' She sat to me gladly,
as upon a throne. I, half in tempest, half in rainbow, sketched her,
and naturally had to leave the picture uncopied. But, young man, some
letters, which formed my name at that time, and which I wrote and
concealed on the picture in the region of the heart under the
water-colors, may serve thee as a Tetragrammaton, eleven Dominical
letters and mothers of the reading (_matres lectionis_) of thy
existence, in case I reach Spain safely, and in Valencia wash away on
the likeness the coloring from my letters, and can now read in its
heart, _Löwenskiold_. So was I then called in Danish.
"Then is the Countess Linda de Romeiro, without mercy, thy sister
Severina. God grant only that thou mayst not haply have seen and
married her before the receipt of this letter. She must, according to
what I heard yesterday, have set out for Italy.
"For when I saw the Countess Linda here for the first time, it was to
me, in the market square of Pestitz, as if I were standing up on the
terrace of Isola Bella, and beholding the Alps, thy mother, my youth,
hardly three paces distant from me! By Heaven, just as if in the
pier-mirror of time the white rosy image of thy buried mother had been
snatched at once out of the depths of distance, and brought close to
the glass, and now hung before it in blooming redness, so stood Linda
before me! For the divine resemblance of the two is so great! No Arian
_Homoiousion_[118a] whatever, but a complete Orthodox _Homoousion_[118b]
is to be believed here. Thus would I write to thee, hadst thou the
necessary church-history at hand for the understanding of such an allusion.
"I painted Linda, too, this winter. What she related to me of the
character of her mother was entirely the same, as I had been able to
report to her of the character of the Princess di Lauria.
"Linda's father, or Herr von Romeiro, would never appear, and still, I
hear, has not yet disappeared.
"Linda's mother called herself a Roman and a relative of the Prince di
Lauria.
"In Spain, where I have twice been and inquired, I never could find a
residence of a lady by the name of Cesara.
"Trillion spiders'-strands of probability spin themselves into an
Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth.
"A new, unknown sister is introduced to thee in the Gothic house with
veils and in mirrors.
"And indeed the illusion is produced upon thee through real mirrors by
the honest Baldhead,--who wants something more to be a Christ's-head
than the locks, and whom I in autumn called a dog.
"The aforesaid Baldhead, or head of Anubis, stood, then, (Heaven and
the Devil best know why, but I believe the fact,) as Father of Death on
Isola Bella; he lay as travelling journeyman on the Prince's grave and
in every sort of ambush, to give thee thy sister for wife--in case I
suffered it; but so soon as ever I have sealed this, I sally forth to
Spain, break into Linda's picture cabinet, look after a certain
likeness of her mother, the place and chamber whereof I have taken
pains clearly to ascertain; and if it is the picture by me, then all is
right and the thunder may strike into the midst of the whole business.
"The Baldhead himself is a fifth quarter of a proof,--he is one of the
few men who, when hardly of a spider's thickness, wickedly made water
in their mothers' womb.
"Perhaps I may find thy uncle, who knew me again here, he said, and who
has actually gone off to Valencia.[119]
"O Heavens! if I should succeed (but why not, since my tongue remains
of iron and this leaf comes, in iron, under charge of the honest
Wehrfritz, whose heart is an old German, and does not _Germany_ rightly
represent the _heart_ in the virgin Europa?)--if, I write, I should
succeed in kindling a fire upon a cursed mystery of a straw-door,
tearing all up and down and away, blind gates and sacrificial gates,
and a strong light should fall in upon the brave Linda and the brave
youth, illuminating the neighboring Baldhead (perhaps somebody else),
who even in the darkness will fain make a slanting thrust with two
grafting and slaughtering knives down into a brother and sister----
"If I should once succeed in this, that is to say, in the harvest
month,--for then I should come back again to Pestitz and have the
likeness in my pocket,--and I should have boldly avenged myself and two
innocent beings upon guilty ones: then would I hold myself fully at
liberty to seize hold of my head and say, '_À bas, gare_, heads off!'
To which, certainly, (since, indeed, the question is not of any stupid
packing off of the body by a Werther-powder, but only of the purpose to
lose, upon occasion, what competent judges call my understanding,) my
friends must agree, because they would still have me (since in this
case the body is still retained), although as the night-piece of a man,
because I would then carry on a rational discourse upon any subject
(only let no one attack the fixed idea!) as well as another man, and
certainly should not forget to sprinkle over it, now and then, a good
moral joke (verily the true spice), and because the state should find
me day and night equipped and saddled to save it, after the example of
the Berlin Bedlamites, who once, upon a fire breaking out in the house,
extinguished it and saved the house in the best style, and I would come
in at the gap and the breach, when the dark intervals of its other
civil servants could not otherwise be filled up than with our lucid
ones.
"Farewell! I break off. The world smiles upon me gayly. In Spain I
shall find a bit of youth again--as in this writing.
"Schoppe.
"Apropos! Has the Baldhead nowhere run against thee? I cannot tell thee
how I labor now daily to impress upon myself and appropriate beforehand
a real horror and dread at the wish of running him down hereafter in my
madness, in order that afterward the possible act may not, as a late
fruit of my previous rational, moral state, be reckoned over against me
into the other.
"_Annihilate this letter!_"
When Albano raised his fiery eyes from the letter, he stood before
Lilar under a high triumphal arch, and the sun went down in splendor
behind Elysium. "Dost thou not know me?" asked Linda, in a low tone,
who stood beside him in travelling dress, weeping in bright love and
bliss; and Julienne came flying out and making a sign of caution to
both, from the entrance thicket of the flute-dell, and cried, as a
cunning pretext: "Linda, Linda, hearest thou not the flutes, then?" And
Albano had forgotten the painful letter.