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 Thümmel 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 Ætius 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 Kämpf'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 Kämpf'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 état--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!