Before the 31st of December arrived, of course Christmas came, a time which had to be gilt, and which turned Siebenkæs’s silver age (after the Royal shot) into a brazen and a wooden age. The money went. But, worse than that, poor Firmian had fretted, and laughed, himself into an illness. A man who has all his life, upon the upper wings of Fantasy and the lower wings of good spirits, skimmed lightly away over the tops of all the spread-net snares and the open pitfalls of life, does, if once he chances to get impaled upon the hard spines of the full-blown thistles (above the purple blossoms and the honey-vessels of which he used to hover) beat in a terrible way about him, hungry, bleeding, epileptically—a glad, happy man finds in the first sunstroke of trouble well-nigh his death-blow. To the polypus of anxiety daily growing in Siebenkæs’s heart add the effects of the work and excitement of authorship. He was very anxious to get done with his ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers’ at the earliest moment possible, so as to live on the price of them and carry on the law-suit besides. So that he sat through entire nights almost (and chairs as well). And in this way he wrote himself into an affection of the chest, such as the present author brought upon himself, and that, as far as he could make out, simply by excess of bountiful generosity towards the world of letters. He was attacked, just as I was, by a sudden pausing of the breath and of the action of the heart, succeeded by a blank disappearance of the spirit of life, and then by a throbbing rush of blood up to the brain; and this came on most frequently while he was sitting at his literary spinning-wheel and spool.[[53]]
However, not a soul offers either of us one single farthing, by way of indemnification, on account of it. It would appear to be ordained that authors are not to go down to posterity in the body, but only in the form of portraits or plaster-casts; as delicate trout are boiled before being sent away as presents, people don’t put in the laurel-sprig (which is stuck into our mouths as lemons are into the wild boar’s) until we have been killed and dished. It would be a gratification to my colleagues and to me if a reader whose heart we have moved (as well as its auricles) were only to say as much as, “This sweet emotion of my heart was not produced without a hypochondriac palpitation of theirs.” We brighten and illuminate many a head which never dreams of thinking. “Yes, I have to thank them for this, it is true, but what is their reward? Why, pains in their own heads—kephalalgia and neuralgia in various forms!” Ay, he ought to interrupt me in the middle of a satire like this, and cry, “Great as is the pain which his satires cause me, they cause him far more; luckily, my pain is only mental!” Health of body only runs parallel with health of mind; it turns aside and departs from erudition, from over-much imagination, and from great profundity. All these as little indicate health of mind as corpulence, a runner’s feet, a wrestler’s arms, indicate health of body. I have often wished that all souls were bottled into their bodies as the Pyrmont water is put into its flasks. The best strength of it is allowed to escape first, because, otherwise, it would break the bottle; but it would seem that it is only in the case of colleges of cardinals (if we are to credit Gorani), cathedral chapters, &c., that this precaution is adopted, and that their extraordinary power of ability, which would other wise have burst their bodies up, is, as a preliminary measure, let off a good deal before they are put into bodies and sent upon earth; so that the bottles last quite well for seventy or eighty years.
With a sick mind, then, and a sick heart, without money, Siebenkæs begun the last day of the year. The day itself had put on its most beautiful summer-dress—one of Berlin blue; it was as cerulean as Krishna, or the new sect of Grahamites, or the Jews in Persia. It had had a fire lighted in the balloon-stove of the sun, and the snow, delicately candied upon the earth, melted into wintergreen, like the sugar on some cunningly-devised supper-dish, as soon as the hills were brought within reach of its warmth. The year seemed to be saying good-bye to Time as if with a cheerful warmth, attended with joyful tears. Firmian longed to run and sun himself upon the moist, green sward; but he had Professor Lang, of Baireuth, to review first.
He wrote reviews as many people offer up prayers—only in time of need. It was like the water-carrying of the Athenian, done that he might afterwards devote himself to the studies of his choice without dying of hunger. But when he was reviewing, he drew his satiric sting into its sheath, constructing his criticisms of material drawn only from his store of wax and his honey-bag. “Little authors,” he said, “are always better than their works, and great ones are worse than theirs. Why should I pardon moral failings—e.g. self-conceit—in the genius, and not in the dunce? Least of all should it be forgiven the genius. Unmerited poverty and ugliness do not deserve to be ridiculed; but they as little deserve it when they are merited—though I am aware Cicero is against me here—for a moral fault (and consequently its punishment) can, of a certainty, not be made greater by a chance physical consequence, which sometimes follows upon it, and sometimes does not. Can it? Does an extravagant person who chances to come to poverty deserve a severer punishment than one who does not? If anything, rather the reverse.” If we apply this to bad authors, from whose own eyes their lack of merit is hidden by an impenetrable veil of self-conceit, and at whose unoffending heart the critic discharges the fury which is aroused in him by their (offending) heads, we may, indeed, direct our bitterest irony against the race, but the individual will be best instructed by means of gentleness. I think it would be the gold-test, the trial-by-crucible, of a morally great and altogether perfect scholar to give him a bad, but celebrated book to review.
For my own part, I will allow myself to be reviewed by Dr. Merkel throughout eternity if I digress again in this chapter. Firmian worked in some haste at his notice of Lang’s essay, entitled “Præmissa Historiæ Superintendentium Generalium Bairuthi non Specialium—Continuatione XX.” It was quite essential that he should get hold of a dollar or two that day, and he also longed to go and take a walk, the weather was so motherly, so hatching. The new year fell on the Saturday, and as early as the Thursday (the day before the one we are writing of) Lenette had begun the holding of preliminary feasts of purification (she now washed daily more and more in advance of actual necessities); but to-day she was keeping a regular feast of in-gathering among the furniture, &c. The room was being put through a course of derivative treatment for the clearing away of all impurities. With her eye on her index expurgandorum, she thrust everything that had wooden legs into the water, and followed it herself with balls of soap; in short, she paddled and bubbled, in the Levitical purification of the room, in her warm, native element, for once in her life to her heart’s full content. As for Siebenkæs, he sat bolt-upright in purgatorial fire, already beginning to emit a smell of burning.
For, as it happened, he was rather madder than usual that day, to begin with. Firstly, because he had made up his mind that he would pawn the striped calico-gown in the afternoon, though whole nunneries were to shriek their loudest at it, and because he foresaw that he would have to grow exceedingly warm in consequence. And this resolve of resolves he had taken on this particular day, because (and this is at the same time the second reason why he was madder than usual)—because he was sorry that their good days were all gone again, and that their music of the spheres had all been marred by Lenette’s funereal Misereres.
“Wife!” he said, “I’m reviewing for money now, recollect.” She went on with her scraping. “I have got Professor Lang before me here—the seventh chapter of him, in which he treats of the sixth of the Superintendents-General of Bayreuth, Herr Stockfleth.” She was going to stop in a minute or two, but just then, you know, she really could NOT. Women are fond of doing everything “by and bye”—they like putting a thing off just for a minute or two, which is the reason why they put off even their arrival in this world a few minutes longer than boys do.[[54]] “This essay,” he continued, with forced calmness, “ought to have been reviewed in the ‘Messenger’ six months ago, and it’ll never do for the ‘Messenger’ to be like the ‘Universal German Library’ and the Pope, and canonise people a century or so after date.”
If he had only been able to maintain his forced calmness for one minute longer, he would have got to the end of Lenette’s buzzing din; however, he couldn’t. “Oh! the devil take me, and you, too, and the ‘Messenger of the Gods’ into the bargain,” he burst out, starting up and dashing his pen on the floor. “I don’t know,” he went on, suddenly resuming his self-control, speaking in a faint, piteous tone, and sitting down, quite unnerved, feeling something like a man with cupping-glasses on all over him—“I don’t know a bit what I’m translating, or whether I’m writing Stockfleth or Lang. What a stupid arrangement it is that an advocate mayn’t be as deaf as a judge. If I were deaf, I should be exempt from torture then. Do you know how many people it takes to constitute a tumult by law? Either ten, or you by yourself in that washing academy of music of yours.” He was not so much inclined to be reasonable as to do as the Spanish innkeeper did, who charged the noise made by his guests in the bill. But now, having had her way, and gained her point, she was noiseless in word and deed.
He finished his critique in the forenoon, and sent it to Stiefel, his chief, who wrote back that he would bring the money for it himself in the evening, for he now seized upon every possible opportunity of paying a visit. At dinner Firmian (in whose head the sultry, fœtid vapour of ill-temper would not dissolve and fall), said, “I can’t understand how you come to care so very little about cleanliness and order. It would be better even if you rather overdid your cleanliness than otherwise. People say, what a pity it is such an orderly man as Siebenkæs should have such a slovenly kind of wife!” To irony of this sort, though she knew quite well it was irony, she always opposed regular formal arguments. He could never get her to enjoy these little jests instead of arguing about them, or join him in laughing at the masculine view of the question. The fact is, a woman abandons her opinion as soon as her husband adopts it. Even in church, the women sing the tunes an octave higher than the men that they may differ from them in all things.
In the afternoon the great, the momentous, hour approached in which the ostracism, the banishment from house and home, of the checked calico gown was at last to be carried out—the last and greatest deed of the year 1785. Of this signal for fight, this Timour’s and Muhammed’s red battle-flag, this Ziska’s hide, which always set them by the ears, his very soul was sick: he would have been delighted if somebody would have stolen it, simply to be quit of the wearisome, threadbare idea of the wretched rag for good and all. He did not hurry himself, but introduced his petition with all the wordy prolixity of an M.P. addressing the house (at home). He asked her to guess what might be the greatest kindness, the most signal favour which she could do him on this last day of the old year. He said he had an hereditary enemy, an Anti-Christ, a dragon, living under his roof; tares sown among his wheat by an enemy, which she could pull up if she chose; and, at last, he brought the checked calico gown out of the drawer, with a kind of twilight sorrow: “This,” he said, “is the bird of prey which pursues me; the net which Satan sets to catch me; his sheep-skin my martyr-robe, my Cassim’s slipper. Dearest, do me but this one favour—send it to the pawn-shop!”