“You see,” he continued, “it cannot be the me of a person that we hate; for the me is still the same me when it improves, and wins our regard.”
In the warmth of our discussion we were losing sight altogether of one of the two concave mirrors which distort other people’s moral distortions for us even more wildly than they are distorted to begin with—I mean, our own egotism. Often, when I have seen and heard women squabbling in the market-place (women of whom one was just as good as the other, and with just as good an opinion of herself), and one hurling her invectives with delight, like a red-hot stone, at the other’s head, which seethed and swelled in waves of anger around that stone, while a third woman kept calm and cool in the midway-path between, I have been ashamed of the human race—ashamed that the self-same reproach, or immorality, which ought to produce exactly the same effect upon all the three, should make too strong an impression on the one, too weak a one on the other, none whatever on the third.
Paul pointed to the second of these distorting mirrors—our bodily senses. For these render the vinegar of hatred doubly bitter by throwing into its fermenting-vat these parts of the enemy which they take cognizance of—his clothes, movements, gestures, tones, &c.
Here we reached the Gordian knot which only I could cut with the Piqueur. “Who is to save us from these bodily senses?” I inquired (with a certain amount of hopeful expectancy). Melchior answered, “I do not allow them to influence my philanthropy, at all events. They are the straw which feeds the flame under that ascending windbag balloon, the heart.”
Jean Paul thrust me back from the Gordian knot. “I,” he said, “have an admirable sweetener at all times in readiness to apply when a sinner embitters my senses. I take him, and (like a victorious enemy) strip all the clothes off him, not leaving him so much as his hat or his wig. When once I’ve got him standing there before me, cold and wretched as any corpse (I mean, of course, in imagination), I begin to feel sorry for the scoundrel. But this is not enough. I have got to sweeten myself a good deal more than this; so I proceed to slit him up with a long, slicing cut from top to bottom into three cavities (as if he were a carp), so that I can see his heart and brain pulsating. The mere sight of a red human heart (Danaid’s bucket for happiness—safe storehouse of so many a sorrow) makes my own soft and heavy; and I have often not forgiven a street robber till the Professor has been shewing us his heart and brain in the anatomical theatre. ‘Thou unhappy, sorrowful heart,’ I have always found myself thinking, with deep, sympathetic emotion, ‘how many a blood-billow has gone surging through thee, glowing and freezing in the same moment.’ But if all this process failed to have its effect, I should proceed to extremities, and smite my enemy dead; then take the naked, fluttering, trembling soul—like an evening moth—out of its brain-chamber chrysalis, and, holding up the quivering night-creature between my forefinger and thumb, gaze at it without a trace of rancour left in me.”
“To picture one’s enemy to one’s self as unclothed, or disembodied,” said I, “so as to be able to put up with him, as though he were dead (perhaps that is the chief reason why we love the dead), is just the operation I perform too. I often try to soften the unpleasant effect which some repulsive physiognomy produces upon me by thinking of it as scalped, and with its skin folded back.”
And now I determined, seriously and in earnest, that the sceptre and throne insignia of the conversation, should no more depart from my hands. Wherefore I commenced as follows: “But who is to provide us with the time and the power, not only to remember, but to act upon, this precious and reliable principle, or rule of conduct, right in the thick of this world’s Pyrrhic war-dance, and the rapid evolutions of our emotions? Who is to stoke the æther-flame of philanthropy with a sufficient supply of combustible matter, seeing that there are such hosts of people continually drowning it out, smothering it up, and building it in! Who is to make up to us for the lack of a gentle, quiet temperament? Who, or what?”
Just as I was going to fix the Piqueur on to this lance-shaft by way of point, the cold dinner was brought, and the Professor’s wife went to fetch her children. For the dinner had to be over before sunset; because, like a fresh supply of green firewood, it would drown out the flame of enthusiasm for a time, and break the unity of its vertical, purple fire pyramid. The company, therefore, waited in vain for me to go on with what I had to say. I shook my head, expressing, by nods, that I should do so when we were all together again, and sitting down.
While we were at dinner I was able to set up my speaking machine, and set it a-going at my ease.
“I asked you once or twice before dinner,” I commenced, “who can invigorate and quicken our principles of love to our fellows, and set them fully to work? I answer, the chief Piqueur can; only I’m afraid I’ve made so many false starts, and baulked in so many of my runs before making this grand jump of mine, that I have led you to entertain far greater expectations concerning it than it (or I) may be able to fulfil. A day or two before the stump-end of the chief Piqueur’s life-candle fell down and went guttering out in its candlestick-socket, he sent for me to the side of his bed of suffering and begged me—not to prescribe for him, but—to make a thorough inspection of his house. He drew my head down close to his wretched pillow, and said, ‘You see, doctor, Death has got his hunting-knife at my throat. But I’m not sorry to go, and what little I leave behind me in the shape of worldly gear goes all to the poor. It’s but little that I have ever thought of scraping together for myself, and that is a comfort to think on now. It’s for the poor that I have screwed and saved, pinched and pared; and when a man has done that it’s a pleasure to him to make his will; he knows it will be paid back again elsewhere. But there’s one hard stone at my heart still. You see I have neither chick nor child belonging to me, and when the breath is out of my body, the old woman who keeps my room in order will be in the house by herself. She’s an honest body enough, but as poor as a church mouse, and pretty sure to help herself to something before the seals are put on my effects. Now, doctor, you are a man who are just as good to the poor as I am myself; you often prescribe for them gratis; I want to ask you to go through the house with the notary (I don’t trust him a bit more than I do the old woman), take an inventory of what there is, and have a regular notarial instrument drawn up concerning my property. I’ve left the whole of it to the Poor-house and the Institution for Destitute Gamekeepers. The notary must begin with my breeches under the pillow here, because my purse is there.’