The reason is that every sentiment and every passion is a mad thing, demanding, or building, a complete world of its own. We are capable of being vexed because it’s past twelve o’clock, or because it’s not past, but only just twelve o’clock. What nonsense! The passion wants besides a personality of its own (sein eignes Ich), and a world of its own,—a time of its own as well. I beg every one, just for once, to let his passions speak plainly out, and to listen to them, and ascertain what it is that they really each of them want; he will be dismayed when he sees what monstrous things are these desires of theirs which they have previously only half muttered. Anger would have but one neck for all mankind, love would have but one heart, sorrow but one pair of lachrymal ducts, and pride two bent knees!
When I was reading in Widman’s ‘Höfer Chronik’ the account of the fearful, bloody times of the thirty years’ war, and, as it were, lived them over again; when I heard once more the cries for help of those poor suffering people, all struggling in the Danube-whirlpools of their days—and saw the beating of their hands, and their delirious wanderings on the crumbling pillars of broken bridges, foaming billows and drifting ice-floes dashing against them; and then, when I thought “All these waves have gone down, the ice is melted, the howling turmoil is all sunk to silence, so are the human beings and all their sighs”—I was filled with a melancholy comfort, a thought of consolation for all times, and I asked, “Was, and is, then, this passing, cursory, transient burst of sorrow at the CHURCHYARD-GATE OF LIFE, which three steps into the nearest cavern could end, a fit cause for this cowardly lamentation?” Truly if, as I believe, there be such a thing as true patience under an eternal woe, then, verily, patience under a transitory sorrow is hardly worth the name.
A great but unmerited national calamity should not humble us, as the theologians would have it—it should make us proud. When the long, heavy sword of war falls upon mankind, and thousands of blanched hearts are torn and bleeding—or when in the blue, pure evening sky the hot cloud of a burning city, smoking on its funereal pyre, hangs dark and lurid, like a cloud of ashes, the ashes of thousands of hearts and joys all burnt to cinders and dust—then let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, let it loathe, contemn, and despise tears, and that for which they fall, and let it say—
“Thou art much too small a thing, thou every-day, common life, that an immortal being should be inconsolable with regard to thee, thou torn and tattered chance-bargain of an existence. Here upon this earth—the ashes of centuries rolled into a sphere, worked into shape and form from vapour by convulsion—the cry of one dreaming in a sorrowful dream—I say, it is a disgrace that the sigh should cease only when the breast which gives it utterance is resolved into its elements, and that the tear should cease to flow only when the eye is closed in death.”
But moderate this thy sublime transport of indignation and put to thyself this question, “If He, the Infinite one, who, veiled from thy sight, sits surrounded by the gleaming abysses, without bounds save such as Himself creates, were to lay bare to thy sight the immeasurability of infinity, and let Himself be seen of thee as he distributes the suns, the great spirits, the little human hearts, and our days, and a tear or two therein; wouldst thou rise up out of thy dust against Him, and say, ‘Almighty, be other than thou art!’”
But there is one sorrow which will be forgiven thee, and for which there is recompense; it is sorrow for thy dead. For this sweet sorrow for thy lost ones is, in truth, but another form of consolation; when we long for them, this is but a sadder way of loving them still; and when we think of their departure we shed tears, as well as when we picture to ourselves our happy meeting with them again. And perhaps these tears differ not.
CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER VI.
THE CHECKED CALICO DRESS—MORE PLEDGES—CHRISTIAN NEGLECT OF THE STUDY OF JUDAISM—A HELPING ARM (OF LEATHER) STRETCHED FORTH FROM THE CLOUDS—THE AUCTION.
The St. Andrew’s shooting-match will take place in the seventh chapter: the present one fills up the wintry thorny interval up to that period—that is to say, the wolf-month with its wolf-hunger. Siebenkæs would at that period have been much annoyed if any one had told him beforehand with what compassion the flourishing state of his trading enterprises was one day to be described by me, and, as a consequence, read by millions of persons in all time to come. He wanted no pity, and said, “If I am quite happy, why should you be pitying me?” The articles of household furniture which he had touched, as with the hand of death, or notched with his axe, like trees marked for cutting, were one by one duly felled and hauled away. The mirror, with the floral border, in the bedroom (which, luckily for itself, could not see itself in any other), was the first thing to be tolled out of the house by the passing- or vesper-bell, under the pall of an apron. Before he stationed it in the train of this dance of death, he proposed to Lenette a substitute for it, the checked calico mourning-dress, in order to accustom her to the idea. It was the “Censeo Carthaginem delendam” (I vote for the destruction of Carthage) which old Cato used to say daily in the senate after every speech.
Next the old arm-chair was got rid of bodily (not like Shakespeare’s arm-chair, which was weighed out by the ounce, like saffron, or in carats, like gold), and the firedog went in company with it. Siebenkæs had the wisdom to say, before they went away, “Censeo Carthaginem delendam,” i. e. “Wouldn’t it be better to pawn the checked calico?”