“Thy (not my) Self,
“L.
“P.S. I wish it would please God to grant me a second life after this, that I might have the opportunity of dealing with a few realities in the next world; for this one is really altogether too hollow and stupid; a wretched Nürnberg toy; nothing but the falling froth of a life; a jump through the hoop of eternity; a rotten, dusty, apple of Sodom, which, splutter as much as I will, I can’t get out of my mouth. Oh!—”
To readers who think the above piece of humour not sufficiently serious, I shall prove, in another place, that it is too serious, and that it is only an oppressed heart which can jest in this fashion; that it is only an eye which is in much too feverish a condition—with the fireworks of life darting round it like the flying fire-flashes which precede amaurosis—which is capable of seeing and picturing such fever-forms.
Firmian understood it all, at the time in question at all events. But I must go back to the 11th of February, in order to half-deprive the reader of his sympathising enjoyment of the re-union of the trefoil of friends which then took place. Lenette’s trembling petition that her husband would pardon her, was but the forced hot-bed fruit of Zichen’s earth-shaking prophecy. She thought that she herself, and the ground she stood upon, were about to be let down; and it was at the near approach of death (whom she thought she already saw wagging his tiger’s tail) that she held out to her husband a hand of Christian peace. For (and to) that beautiful soul of his (disembodied) hers wept tears of love and of rapture. But very probably she, to some extent, confused her happiness with her love—satisfaction with fidelity; and (it may be suspected) the eagerness with which she was looking forward to enwrapping the Schulrath, that very evening, in a warm and tender—gaze, found outward expression in the shape of an unusual degree of affection for her husband. It is here most essential that I should communicate to all and sundry persons one of the most valuable of all my maxims; in dealings with even the very best woman in the world, it is of the utmost importance that we should make excessively certain, and discriminate with the utmost accuracy, what it is which she really wants (at the time being), and particularly whom—(this is not always the person who is thus discriminating). There is in the female heart such a rapid coming and going, and fluctuation, of emotions of every kind; such an effusion of many-tinted bubbles which reflect everything, but most particularly whatever chances to be nearest, that a woman, under the influence of emotion, shall, while she sheds a tear for you out of her left eye, go on thinking, and drop another for your predecessor or successor (as the case may be) out of her right. Also a feeling of tenderness for a rival falls half to a husband’s share; and a woman, even the most loyally faithful, weeps more at what she thinks than at what she hears.
’Tis very stupid that so many masculine persons among us are stupid precisely on this point; that a woman thinking (as she does) more of other people’s feelings than of her own, is, in this matter, neither the deceiver nor the deceived; what she is is the deception itself—the optical deception and the acoustic.
But Firmians seldom make well-digested reflections of this sort concerning elevenths of February until the twelfth. Wendeline was in love with the Schulrath; that was the fact of the matter. Like all women of any sense (in Kuhschnappel), she had believed in the superintendent-general, and in the kick he had administered to the earth, until Peltzstiefel, in the evening, unhesitatingly pronounced the idea of such a thing to be simply impious, when she abandoned the prophetic superintendent and gave in her adhesion to the incredulous worldling, Firmian. We all know that he had every bit as much of the masculine failing of overdoing consistency as she had of the feminine one of carrying inconsistency too far. It was foolish, therefore, in him to think that he was going to regain, by means of one grand effusion of the heart, an affection embittered by so many small effusions of gall. The grandest benefits, the loftiest manly enthusiasm, are incapable of uprooting, all in an instant, a feeling of ill-will which has rooted itself all over a person’s heart with a thousand little spreading fibres. The affection which we have deprived ourselves of by means of a long-continued, gradual process of chilling, is only to be regained by an equally lengthy process of warming.
In a word, it became evident in the course of a day or two that things were just as they had been three weeks before. Lenette’s love had flourished and grown to such an extent, by reason of Stiefel’s absence, that there was not room for it any longer under its bell-glass—it was shooting out leaves beyond the edge of it into the open-air. The Aqua Toffana of jealousy at last permeated every vessel in Firmian’s body, flowed into his heart, and gnawed it slowly in pieces. He was but the tree on which Lenette had inscribed her love for another, and was withering by reason of the incisions. He had so hoped that the Schulrath, recalled to them on Lenette’s birthday, would have healed all wounds, however deep; or at all events cicatrized them over: whereas, what he really had done was to open them all wider than ever—all unconscious as he was of it. Ah! what pain this was to the wretched husband! He grew poorer and weaker, and more miserable—both outwardly and inwardly—as the days went by, and gave up all hope of ever seeing the First of May and Bayreuth. February, March, and April passed over head—all heavy, dripping clouds, without a single break of blue sky or blink of evening-red.
On the 1st of April he lost his law-suit for the second time; and on the 13th (Maunday Thursday) he finished, for ever, his ‘Evening Paper’ (this was the name he gave to his diary, because he wrote it of an evening), meaning to consign that, along with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ (as far as they were completed) into Leibgeber’s most faithful hands (at Bayreuth), in place of his body, so soon to vanish and be resolved into its elements. For, he thought, those hands would fainer clasp his soul (which was in the papers) than his poor meagre body—of which, du reste, Liebgeber always possessed a second unaltered edition (a perfect facsimile copy, so to speak) at all times at hand, in the shape of his own. I have no hesitation in here quoting, without emendation, the whole of this concluding page of the ‘Evening Paper’—Firmian’s ‘Swan Song,’ which—which went off by the following post.
“Yesterday, my law-suit was wrecked on the shoal of the Court of Appeal of the second instance. The defendant’s counsel, and the Court, brought to bear upon me an old Statute, of force in Kuhschnappel as well as in Bayreuth, which enacts that a deposition made before a notary is not valid—depositions having to be made before the Court. These two hearings of my case render the uphill path to the third a little easier. For my poor Lenette’s sake I have appealed to the Lower House, my kind Stiefel advancing me the necessary cash. Truly, in applying to the oracles of Justice we have to fast and mortify, just as much as was de rigueur in consulting the heathen oracles of old. I have reason to hope that I shall be able to effect my escape from the clutches of the knaves of the State;[[58]] or (shall I say), from these game-keepers and their couteaux de chasse, and hunting-spears or swords of Themis. I think I shall get through their hunting-tackle of legal proceedings, the toils, nets, and gins of their Acts of Parliament—not by my purse (which is fallen away to the thickness of an insect’s feeler, and could be drawn, like a leather queue, through the smallest mesh in any of their legal nets)—but with my body, which, as it approaches the topmost of their nets will be turned into dust of death, and will then fly free through and over every trap they can set.