There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his
fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail
was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of
the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the
teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another's trouble
than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in
bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses),
except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as
well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only
in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar
and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe
from his chest.
These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us,
things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than
everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him
unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle
of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large
apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we
should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have,
namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely,
seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out,
namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not
look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits
down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar
skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own
tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a
crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine
complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the
moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am
diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite
different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g.,
entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of
the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled
self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head
to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff,
because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it
off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we
male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to
keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor
opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the
best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid
to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was
capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor
persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises
with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures
with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her
eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her
tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from
such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as
pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.
We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up
the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I
have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him.
This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is
this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to
everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already
overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the
board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49]
of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest
of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have
got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him
nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his
book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as
he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of
romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad
neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor)
have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral
cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his
eyes shall run over.
And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just
the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the
poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly
leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly
without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be
myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of
this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to
whom Nature has denied æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in
tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is
good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these
should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet
with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a
great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last?
How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very
differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by
Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow
over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not,
says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will,
and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing,
which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North
American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from
Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and
composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"
I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their
wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted
spectators of æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still
less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have
the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people,
reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great
composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and
others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself
that--if there ever was hope of the like--it is precisely now, when the
German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble
insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made
bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through
Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We
never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine
would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but
we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far
and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and
gallows-trees,--for that takes hold of us,--but if he only half
good-humoredly trots along--I seem really to see him at this moment
riding--on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and
with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if,
finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the
tenderer, more delicate soul;--then are we now already in a condition
to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure.
People of more moderate force _sleep_ at least, so as not to _suffer_
over a Goethe's _Iphigenia_, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we
absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have
no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion--as a prince wrote--is the
only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after
a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a
Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding
epopee.