In this life Monsieur Le Grand never drummed more. And his drum never gave forth another sound; it was not destined to serve the enemies of liberty for their servile roll calls. I had well understood Le Grand's last entreating glance, and at once drew the sword from my cane, and pierced the drum.
CHAPTER XI.
Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas, Madame!
But life is in reality so terribly serious, that it would be insupportable without such union of the pathetic and the comic; as our poets well know. The most harrowing forms of human madness Aristophanes exhibits only in the laughing mirror of wit; Goethe only presumes to set forth the fearful pain of thought comprehending its own nothingness in the doggerel of a puppet show; and Shakespeare puts the most deadly lamentation over the misery of the world into the mouth of a fool, who rattles his cap and bells in agony.
They have all learned from the great First Poet, who, in his World Tragedy in thousands of acts, knows how to carry humour to the highest point, as we see every day. After the departure of the heroes, the clowns and graciosos enter with their baubles and wooden swords, and after the bloody scenes of the Revolution there came waddling on the stage the fat Bourbons, with their stale jokes and tender "legitimate" bon mots, and the old noblesse with their starved laughter hopped merrily before them, while behind all swept the pious Capuchins with candles, cross, and banners of the Church. Yes, even in the highest pathos of the World Tragedy, bits of fun slip in. The desperate republican, who, like Brutus, plunged a knife to his heart, perhaps smelt it first to see whether some one had not split a herring with it—and on this great stage of the world all passes exactly the same as on our beggarly boards. On it, too, there are tipsy heroes, kings who forget their part, scenes which obstinately stay up in the air, prompters' voices sounding above everything, danseuses who create astonishing effects with the poetry of their legs, and costumes which are the main thing. And high in Heaven, in the first row of the boxes, sit the dear little angels, and keep their lorgnettes on us comedians here down below, and the blessed Lord himself sits seriously in his great box, and, perhaps, finds it dull, or calculates that this theatre cannot be kept up much longer because this one gets too high a salary, and that one too little, and that they all play much too badly.
Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas, Madame! As I ended the last chapter, narrating to you how Monsieur Le Grand died, and how I conscientiously executed the testamentum militaire which lay in his last glance, some one knocked at my door, and there entered a poor old lady, who asked if I were not a Doctor. And as I assented, she kindly asked me to go home with her and cut her husband's corns.
LAST WORDS (Reisebilder).
Written 29th November 1830.
It was a depressed, an arrested time in Germany when I wrote the second volume of the Reisebilder, and had it printed as I wrote. But before it appeared something was whispered about it; it was said that my book would awaken and encourage the cowed spirit of freedom, and that measures were being taken to suppress it. When such rumours were afloat, it was advisable to advance the book as quickly as possible, and drive it through the press. As it was necessary, too, that it should contain a certain number of leaves, to escape the requisitions of the estimable censorship, I followed the example of Benvenuto Cellini, who, in founding his Perseas, was short of bronze, and to fill up the mould threw into the molten metal all the tin plates he could lay his hands on. It was certainly easy to distinguish between the tin—especially the tin termination of the book—and the better bronze; anyone, however, who understands the craft will not betray the workman.
But as everything in this world is liable to turn up again, so it came to pass that, in this very volume, I found myself again in the same scrape, and I have been obliged to again throw some tin into the mould—let me hope that this renewed melting of baser metal will simply be attributed to the pressure of the times.
Alas! the whole book sprang from the pressure of the times, as well as the earlier writings of similar tendency. The more intimate friends of the writer, who are acquainted with his private circumstances, know well how little his own vanity forced him to the tribune, and how great were the sacrifices which he was obliged to make for every independent word which he has spoken since then and—if God will!—which he still means to speak. Now-a-days, a word is a deed whose consequences cannot be measured, and no one knows whether he may not in the end appear as witness to his words in blood.