CHAPTER XI.
LEIBGEBER’S DISQUISITION ON FAME—FIRMIAN’S “EVENING PAPER.”
In my last chapter I practised a deception on the reader out of pure goodwill towards him; however, I must let him remain undeceived until he has read the following letter of Leibgeber’s:—
“Vaduz February 2, 1786.
“My Firmian Stanislaus,
“In May I shall be in Bayreuth, and you must be there too. I have nothing else of any consequence to write to you now—however, this is quite important enough, namely, that I order you to arrive in Bayreuth upon the first day of the month of gladness, because I have something of the most extraordinarily mad and important kind in my head concerning you, and that as sure as there is a heaven above us. My joy and your happiness depend on your making this journey. I would reveal the whole mystery to you in this letter if I were certain that it would fall into no hands but your own. Come! You might travel in company with a certain Kuhschnappler, of the name of Rosa, who is coming to Bayreuth to fetch his bride home. But if (which God forbid) this Kuhschnappler be that Meyern, of whom you have written to me, and if the said goldfish is about to come swimming here to freeze (rather than to warm) his pretty bride with his dry, wizzened arms (as in Spain they put serpents, something like him, round bottles to cool them), I shall take care, as soon as I get to Bayreuth to give her a very distinct idea of him, and shall maintain that he’s ten thousand times better than the Heresiarch Bellarmin, who committed adultery a great deal oftener during his career—two thousand two hundred and thirty-six times, to wit. I have the most anxious and heartfelt longing to behold the Heimlicher von Blaise; were he but a little nearer at hand I should—(seeing that there’s always something sticking in that throat of his which he has some difficulty in getting down, such as an inheritance, or somebody else’s house and land),—I say, I should give him a good hard thwack every now and then in the small of his back (by way of a cure) and await the outcome—I mean, of the mouthful. I myself have been limping about the world in all directions, with my silhouette scissors, and am now taking a little rest in Vaduz at a studious, bibliothecarian Count’s, who really deserves that I should like him ten times better than I do. But, you see, my fondness for you is fully as much as my heart can hold; and (to speak in general terms) the human race, and this green cheese of a world which it keeps on gnawing at, seem to me more and more rotten and stinking every day. I must say to you, ‘Fame may go to the devil!’ I think I shall decidedly dip down, disappear, and get out of the way altogether, almost immediately, run right into the thick of the crowd, and come to the surface every week under a new name, so that the fools shan’t know who I am. Ah! there were a few years, once on a time, when I really did wish to be something—if not a great author, at least a ninth elector—to be mitred, at any rate, if not belaurelled—if not (now and then) to be a pro-rector, certainly (and very often) to be a dean. At that period of my life I should have been exceedingly delighted had I suffered the most atrocious tortures from gallstones, because I should have been able to erect (with those eliminated from my system) an altar or temple in my own honour, higher than the pyramid mentioned by Ruysh in his ‘Cabinet of Natural Science’ as having been constructed of the forty-two gallstones of a certain noble lady. Siebenkæs, in those days I could have gotten me a beard of wasps (as Wildau used to have one of bees)—a stinging beard of wasps, for nothing else but to become famous thereby. ‘I quite admit’ (said I, at the period in question) ‘that it is not accorded to every son of earth (neither should he expect it), as it was to Saint Romuald (as Bembo mentions in his life of him), that a city shall beat him to death, merely to be enabled to filch his holy body by way of a relic; but he may, I think, without being unduly conceited, entertain a desire that a few hairs, if not of his fur-coat (as of Voltaire’s, in Paris), yet, at all events, of his head, may have the good luck to be plucked out as a souvenir by people who have a certain opinion of him. (Here I chiefly allude to the reviewers.)’
“At the time in question I thought as above set forth, but now my views are far more enlightened. Fame is a thing altogether unworthy of fame. I was once sitting, on a cold, wet evening, on a boundary-stone, considering myself carefully, and I said, ‘Now, is there really anything in the wide world that can be made of you? What is it? Have you any chance of becoming (like the deceased Cornelius Agrippa) Secretary of State for War to the Emperor Maximilian, and Historiographer to the Emperor Charles the Fifth? Will YOU ever hoist yourself up to the position of Syndic and Advocate of the city of Metz, Physician in Ordinary to the Duchess of Anjou, and Professor of Theology in Pavia? Do you find that the Cardinal of Lorraine is as anxious to stand godfather to your son as he was to Agrippa’s? And would it not be ludicrous if you were to give out (and give yourself airs about it) that a Margrave in Italy, and the King of England, the Chancellor Mercurius Galinaria, and Margarita (a Princess of Austria), had all wished to have you in their service in the same year? Wouldn’t it be ludicrous, and a lie into the bargain, to say nothing of the utter impossibility of the thing, seeing that all these people exploded into the sleeping-powder of death so many years before you flashed up in the shape of the priming and detonating powder of life! In what well-known work (let me ask you) does Paul Jovius style you a portentosum ingenium? What author reckons you among the clarissima sui sæculi lumina? If it had been the case that you stood in extraordinary credit with four cardinals and five bishops—with Erasmus, Melancthon, and Capellanus—wouldn’t Schröckh and Schmidt have mentioned it, en passant, in their “History of the Reformation”? Even supposing that I were actually reposing side by side with Cornelius Agrippa under his great grove of shrubbery of laurels, the same lot would be mine and his; we should both rot away in obscurity beneath the thicket, and it would be centuries before anybody came to lift the branches and take a look at us.’
“It would do me no more good were I to go about the matter more knowingly, and have myself belauded in the ‘Universal German Library.’ I might stand for many a long year, with my wreath of bays round my hat in that chill pocket-Pantheon, in my niche amongst the great literati lying and sitting round me on their beds of state—we might all (I say) wait begarlanded there, all alone together in that Temple of Fame of ours for many a long year before a single soul came and opened the door, and looked in at us, or entered and knelt down before me; and our triumphal car would be nothing but a wheelbarrow, on which our temple, with all its riches, should be whirled occasionally to a public auction. Yet I might, perhaps, soar above all that, and make myself immortal, could I but indulge a demi-hope that my immortality would reach the ears of any but those who are themselves as yet in this mortal life. But can it afford me the smallest gratification when I am compelled to perceive that it is exactly to all the most renowned and celebrated of people, over whose faces the laurel is growing, year by year, in their coffins (as the rosemary does over humbler dead), that I can never be anything but an unexplored Africa—particularly to Shem, Ham, and Japhet; to Absalom and his father; to both the Catos, the two Anthonys, Nebuchadnezzar, the Seventy Interpreters, and their wives; to the seven wise men of Greece; even to mere fools, such as Taubmann and Eulenspiegel? When a Henry IV., and the four Evangelists, and Bayle (who knows all the rest of the learned), and the charming Ninon (who knows them better still), and Job, the bearer of sorrows—or, at all events, the author of Job—don’t know that there ever was such a thing as a Leibgeber on the face of the earth: when I am, and must ever remain, to a whole bye-gone world (i. e., six thousand years replete with great and grand men and nations), a mathematical point, an invisible eclipse, a wretched je ne sais quoi, I really do not see how posterity (in which there mayn’t be so very much after all), or the next six thousand years, can do anything to speak of by way of compensation.
“Besides, I cannot tell what description of glorious heavenly hosts and archangels there are upon other world-balls, and on the little spheres in the milky way—that paternoster bead-chaplet of world-balls—seraphs, compared to whom I cannot be looked upon as anything but a sheep. We souls do, it is true, progress to a considerable extent, and ascend to loftier levels. Even here upon earth the oyster-soul develops into a frog-soul, the frog-soul into a cod-fish, the cod-fish into a goose, thence to a sheep, an ass—aye, or even an ape—and ultimately into a Bush Hottentot (for we can suppose nothing higher than that). But a peripatetic climax of this kind begins to cease inflating one with pride when the following reflection occurs to one. Among the various individuals which compose a species of animals (among whom there must certainly occur geniuses, good, sound, common-sense intelligences, and absolute blockheads), we find that we remark and take notice only of the latter, or, at most, of the extremes. No species of animals (considered collectively) is close enough to our retina to admit of our perceiving its delicate middle tints and gradations: and thus must it be with us when some spirit, sitting in heaven, looks at us in the mass. He is so far away, that he will find some trouble (very vain trouble, too) in drawing a proper distinction between Kant, and his shaving looking-glasses—the Kantists; between Goëthe and his imitators; and will see little or no difference between members of faculty and dunces, professors’ lecture-rooms and lunatic asylums; for little steps are wholly lost to the sight of one who is standing on the uppermost of them.
“Now this deprives a thinker of all pleasure and courage; and, Siebenkæs, hang me if I ever sit down and grow one bit famous, or give myself the trouble either to build up or to pull down any learned or ingenious system whatever, or write anything at all of greater length than a letter.