I will answer the question for you: “Weep, storm,[[80]] chide, be very angry, not speak a word, break things, &c.” So terribly does selfishness falsify, corrupt and degrade the most delicate moral feelings, coercing them into the giving of two totally diverse verdicts upon one and the same case. Whenever I am wavering, or in any hesitation, concerning the worth of a character, or conclusion, I always find it helps me to come to a decision in a moment if I represent it to my mind’s-eye as coming wet from the press in a novel or biography. If it seems right then, it is certain to be right.
It was far better, and more becoming, for Graces to dwell hidden in the Satyrs of old, and in Socrates, than to reverse the process, so that Satyrs should dwell hidden within Graces. The Satyr who possessed Lenette butted about him in all directions with horns of very considerable sharpness. Her unreciprocated anger began to take the shape of sneering banter, for her husband’s present meekness and gentleness were so strikingly in contrast with his former Job’s-disputations, that she came to the conclusion that his heart was frozen altogether. In old times he had wanted to be served by mutes (like a Sultan), until his satirical fœtus, his book, should be brought to the light of day by help of the Roonhuysian lever and Cæsarian operation of the penknife; even as Zacharias was dumb until the child ceased to be so, and was born, and cried simultaneously with him. Formerly, their married life had been like most other people’s; for the majority of wedded pairs are like those twin-daughters,[[81]] grown together as to their backs, but continually quarrelling (though they could never look each other in the face), and always trying to go towards opposite quarters of the globe, till the one succeeded in forcing the other in the direction in which she wanted to go. Now, on the contrary, Firmian allowed all Lenette’s discords to jar on as long as they pleased, without the slightest trace of irritation. A soft, peaceful light now fell upon all her angles, upon her works of supererogation in washing, on the water-sproutlings of her tongue; and the tint of the shadow which her heart (made of dark earth, like everybody else’s) cast, as a matter of course, was very much lost in the blue of heaven, as shadows cast in starlight are (according to Mariette) as blue as the sky overhead. And was there not always a grand, blue, starry sky spread out above his soul, in the shape of death? Every morning, every evening, he said to himself, “Why should I not go on always forgiving everything! We have such a very little while to be together now.” Every opportunity of forgiving did something to sweeten the bitterness of his voluntary farewell; and, as those who are going away, or going to die, are eager to pardon,—the deep, warm spring and fount of love in his heart was never chilled from morning till night. He was fain to pass along the brief, dark, alley of weeping willows, which led from his home to his empty grave (a full one, alas! as regarded his love), leaning only on beloved arms; and to rest on the mossy banks by its side, between his friend and his wife, with a beloved hand in each of his own. Thus it is that death not only beautifies our bodies when the soul has fled (as Lavater points out), but even in life the thought of death gives new beauty to our lineaments, and new strength to the heart, as rosemary both winds as a garland about the dead, and revives the fainting by its cordial essence.
“There is nothing surprising to me in this,” quoth the reader. “Everybody in Firmian’s position would have felt just as he did; at all events, I should.” But, dear reader, are we not all in Firmian’s position? Does the nearness or the remoteness of our everlasting good-bye make any difference? Ah! inasmuch as, here below, we are nothing but images, delusively firm, and red of colour, standing on the edges of our holes, into which (like the ancient princes) we totter, crumbling to dust, when the unknown hand gives the mouldering images a shake—why do we not say (like Firmian), “Why should I not forgive? We have so short a time to be together.” We should have four better fast-days, and prayer- and penitence-days, than we usually have if we had but four days of bitter, hopeless sickness to go through, one after the other, every year; because we should look down from our sick bed (that ice-region of life beside the crater) with loftier and sublimer glance upon the pleasure-gardens and pleasure-forests of life as they shrunk and shrivelled away; because there our wretched racecourses would seem shorter, and only the people larger, and we should there love nothing but hearts, magnify and detect no other faults but our own, and because we leave our sick beds with better resolutions than we take to them with. For the first day of convalescence of the body, after its winter of sickness, is the blossoming time of a lovelier soul, which issues forth as if transfigured from the earth’s cold crust into a mild warm Eden; longing to press all things to her breast (feeble yet, and short of breath)—mankind, and flowers, and spring breezes, and every other bosom which has sighed for her upon her bed of pain. Like all the newly risen from death, she longs to love all things throughout an eternity; and the whole heart is a warm and dewy spring-time, rich in buds, beneath a youthful sun.
How Firmian would have loved his Lenette, had she not constrained him to be always pardoning, instead of petting and caressing her! Ah! she would have rendered his approaching death a terribly difficult task for him if she had been like what she was in their honeymoon days!
But their byegone Paradise was now yielding a harvest of ripe Grains of Paradise (the old name for peppercorns). Lenette piled fuel on the fire of her hell’s ante-chamber of jealousy, brewing there, for him, the draught of the coming heaven of Vaduz. A jealous woman can be cured by no kind of speech or treatment; she is like the kettledrums, which are the most difficult of all instruments to tune, and the quickest to get out of tune when tuned. A loving, tender look was, to Lenette, a blister; for he had looked at Nathalie with one like it. If he seemed happy and glad, it was evident he was thinking of the past. If he looked unhappy and sad, he was thinking of the past too, but with longing. He had to consider his face in the light of an open warrant of caption, or billposter and placard, of the thoughts which were behind it. In short, her husband merely served her as fiddle rosin to roughen her horse-hair with, in order to bow her viole d’amour with it from morning till night. He dare not allow himself more than an occasional word about Bayreuth, scarce so much as the name of it; for if he did, she knew whom he was thinking of. Nay, he could not say anything at all strong in disparagement of Kuhschnappel without raising a suspicion that he was comparing it with Bayreuth, and thinking the latter much the better place (for reasons well known to her). Wherefore (and whether in earnest, or from consideration for her, I really do not know) he restricted his laudations of Bayreuth merely to the buildings there, not venturing to extend them to their inhabitants.
There was only one object of praise concerning the praising, whereof he ignored every idea of difficulty and miscomprehension, and this was Leibgeber, his friend. But—thanks to Rosa’s calumnies, and the fact of his having aided and abetted in affairs at Fantaisie—it so chanced that Leibgeber had come to be more unendurable by her now than he had been in the old days, by reason of his indecorous conduct, and his great dog. She knew, moreover, that Stiefel had several times expressed grave disapproval of him and his doings.
“My dear Henry will be here very soon now, Lenette,” said Firmian.
“And that horrible brute with him, I suppose, of course?” she asked.
“I do think,” he answered, “you might like my friend a little better than you do; if not because he is so very like myself, at any rate, on account of the faithfulness of his friendship. If you did, you wouldn’t be so terribly set against his dog; you used not to mind mine when I had one. He must have some faithful creature to follow him about on his everlasting journeys; through thick and thin, through good times and bad, as Saufinder does. And he looks upon me as just such another faithful creature, and is every bit as fond of me. But for that matter, the whole faithful trio of us are not likely to trouble Kuhschnappel very long.”
Meanwhile, no amount of love enabled him to gain his suit for love. It here strikes me that this was only a most natural matter, and that the recent warm proximity of the Schulrath had raised Lenette’s temperature (of love) to such a point that her husband’s felt like a blast of cold wind by comparison. The jealousy of hatred proceeds just like the jealousy of love. There is but one sign for the cypher of nothing and the circle of infinity.