LETTER OF DR. VICTOR TO CATO THE ELDER, ON THE CONVERSION OF I INTO THOU, HE, SHE, YE, AND THEY; OR, THE FEAST OF KINDNESS OF THE 20TH MARCH.
Flachsenfingen, 1st April, 1795.
My dear Cato the Elder,
A breaker of his word like you—who made such a solemn promise to come to my feast, and yet did not come—will have to be punished by having his mouth—not stitched up (which is what savages do to word-breakers,) for that would be a loss only to your hearers—but made to water. When I shall have painted a full and faithful picture of our peace-festival of the soul for you, I shall stop both my ears against the curses which you will pour out on your evil genius. At this feast we all philosophised, and we were all converted, except me, who could not be reckoned a convert, inasmuch as I was myself the converter of the heathen.
Our flotilla of three boats—(the third we were obliged to take in deference to the timidity of the ladies)—got under way about one o’clock in the afternoon of the 20th of March, ran into the stream, gained the open water, and soon after one we were well in sight of the very anther-filaments and spider’s-webs on the island. At a quarter-past two we landed—the professor, his wife, and a girl and boy—Melchior—Jean Paul—the Government Counsellor,—Flamin—the lovely Luna—(off goes the first of your curses here!)—the undersigned, and his wife.
Some Burgundy was then disembarked. At the commencement of spring (which was to take place that day at 38 minutes past 3 o’clock) we meant to enter upon a “stream of life,” coloured and sweetened after a most superlative sort. With the island, Cato, many of us were quite enraptured, and nearly all of us wished we had paid a visit to this beautiful bowling-green in the Rhine—thin pleasure camp amid the waves—long before. Luna, elder Cato—if I mistake not thou hast seen, certainly once at the very least, that tender soul, which ought to dwell in (and heighten the tint of) a white rose in place of a body—Luna shed tears, half of delight (for they were half of sorrow for everybody who was not there), half of delight not so much at the families of alders upon the rounded bank, or the Lombardy poplars lying trembling in intoxication of bliss in the gentle air which breathed about them, or the sunny green paths, as at all this together (in the first place), and at the spring sky and the Rhine (which was showing that sky a picture, as it were, of its antipodean sky somewhere over America), and at the peace and gladness of her soul—but (above all) at the Alp in the centre of the island.
The Alp will be sketched, if an opportunity offers, in this letter. I at once asked Luna where you were. She said, “At the Frankfort Fair.” Was she right?
When a party arrives at a place it is not, like the Anguis Fragilis, to be broken into ten twitching fragments by every touch of chance. Even the ladies kept with us, for I had deprived them of all opportunity of doing anything in the shape of household labour, by the arrangements I had made for the dinner. This Barataria Island was going to be an intellectual Place d’Armes and theatre of war that day. I love disputation. Intellectual bickerings further and heighten the happiness of congenial society, just as lovers’ quarrels are a renewal of love, and fisticuffs a necessity of Marionette operas. Certain people are like the Moravians, among whom the confessor and penitent change places, each laying a picture of his soul before the other, his own police-notice of an absconded criminal—his own advertisement in the “Hue and Cry”; and I am like them. Any blemish or shortcoming which I discover in myself or other people I immediately publish over half the town in a universal German gazette, as ladies do the witnesses’ depositions of evidence concerning strangers. For the last three weeks, dear Cato, my soul has been glowing in the brightest sunlight of peace and love, cast upon me by the deceased chief Piqueur (a man who had not a trace of either the one or the other about him)—and now I cannot rest till I entail this precious legacy upon all of you.
As Lieutenant de Police of the island, I possessed the power of issuing police regulations with respect to the conversation permissible thereon, and I directed the thread of our talk towards the Piqueur in question. But the wasps came buzzing out of their nests; the first of them being your brother, Melchior, who drove his sting into the Piqueur’s avarice, saying that people who didn’t bestow their plunder upon the poor till they were in their own coffins, were like pikes who eject their (swallowed) prey when caught themselves; they should rather do as Judas Iscariot did—cast their pieces of silver into the church before their hanging. The next wasp was your second brother, Jean Paul, who said, “Misers are the only people who haven’t had enough of life when they die. Even when they are in the very grip of Death’s hand, they would fain grasp hold of money with their own. Like cap-mushrooms, when they are broken off, they cling terribly to the earth’s surface with, their bleeding moiety.”
“Ah!” said I, “everyone is a thorough miser as regards something or other, I am sorry to say. I cannot now be so hard upon a man who confines himself to mortifying and chastening himself as I used to be. Where is the extraordinary difference between one of your learned antiquary mint-assayers who distils, evaporates, and injects all the pleasures of his life into the rust of a collection of coins—and a miser who counts and weighs the specimens in his cabinet like so many votes at an election? Not, in reality, so great a difference as there is between our opinions of the two.” I thought I had a fine chance of turning deftly to the subject of the Piqueur at this point, but the entire company called out to me to tell them what o’clock it was. In my capacity of Viceroy, I had disarmed all the islanders of their watches at the landing-place (as if they had been so many swords), that they might pass their day in a blissful eternity, where time was not. The only one allowed to keep his was Paul—and this was because it was one of the new Geneva sort, whose hands always point to 12 o’clock, only telling the real time when one touches a spring.