I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least dependence of the soul upon the body—e. g. in old age, intoxication, &c.—they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a single Pas." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.
We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being, still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy, are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most, as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons the brain against the stomach.—Add to this, that the limits and hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By the way, without the theory of disorganization which assumes negative and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are inexplicable;—e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine, manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food, perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual enervation, also provoke it.—At most in deep sleep, when the nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains; in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping. Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal—except the effeminate tame dog—has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle assigns unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence—I have now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.—
[37. DOG-POST-DAY.]
The Amoroso at Court.—Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.—Defence of Courtly Back-bending.
On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears. Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall. "When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;[[138]] and how the latter, without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall of rock between their sundered souls.—He called to mind, indeed, and right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when he swore eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives (these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the favor of the Prince was to be secured,—but his feelings incessantly repeated to him: "He still ought not to have believed it!—ah, hadst thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me with balls or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily forgiven thee!—But that thou shouldst have done it with just this ever-gnawing venomous sound!"—He is right; the injury of honor is not therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction of right.—For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations easily grow out of little concealments, as from March clouds July tempests. Only a perfected noble soul can forbear to try any longer the tried friend,—can believe when the enemies of the friend deny,—can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion soils the gracious image,—and when at last the doubts are no more to be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions, willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is easier to deserve than to have.
In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[[139]] executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name L' R— sbadita[[140]] without a single R,—hence, like crabs, it is finest in the months without an R in their name.
The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for the listening Mat it had become a grand text and dictum probans of his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.—In the letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most disinterested motives of his prayer.
He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom catches an exact map, the court;—to his heart, filled with paradises, even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic; through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.—So very much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a court.—The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St. Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D—." The Paullinum was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had loved him,—the Princess more proudly,—only Matthieu, who loved best to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.—Does not even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through his Capsarius,[[141]]—the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom (as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, roués, Orleanses, are the most acceptable offerings!—Or, even if he can dispose of that, let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: La décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.—J'aime dans les femmes les accés de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.—C'est là où la finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.—Les femmes s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles s'étonnent un peu.—L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la raison.[[142]]—Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at liberty to cudgel one another."
The Evangelist threw a corrosive drop on the nerves of Victor's heart, when, despite his knowledge of Flamin's noble extraction, he twitted him with this, that like a modern French Equilibrist of Freedom, he could not marry indeed a citizen, but yet could—fight with one. And it went through his soul to see the friend who had been stolen from him so sorely impoverished in friends, that this Matthieu was the last scion and support of the line, who did not even before Victor take the trouble in the higher circles to assume and continue playing the part of a friend of Flamin. A good man has his sensitive heart screwed, as it were, into a flattening press, when he is obliged to stand before people (as Victor here is before so many) who hate and insult him,—in the beginning he is cheerful and cool, and is glad that he cares nothing about it,—but he unconsciously arms himself with more and more contempt, by way of opposing something to the insult,—at last the growth of the contempt announces itself by the disagreeable feeling of love going out and hatred coming in, and the bitter aqua-fortis seizes and devours its own vessel, the heart.—Then the pain becomes so great, that he lets the old human love, which was the warm element of his soul, run again in streams into his bosom. With Victor something else was added to the embittering elements,—his previous softening; one is never colder than after great warmth, just as water, after boiling, assumes a greater coldness than it had before. Love, intoxication, and sometimes the inspiration drunk from the sight of nature, make us too kind towards our favorites, and too hard upon our antipodes. Now when Victor in this bitter mood looked on at a card-table, and delivered to himself internal lectures upon the whole assembly, lectures on heads,[[143]] in which, instead of heads of pasteboard, he availed himself of thicker ones: then the recollection of the still, humane tolerance wherewith Clotilda had accommodated herself to these very people out of love to her parents, made the whole ice-panoply which had formed around his heart, as round a flower, melt down, and his warmed heart said with the first joy it had known to-day: "Why then do I hate these full as much tormented as tormenting shapes so bitterly? Are they here only on my account? Have not they also their conscious being? Must they not drag with them this defective, afflicted self through all Eternity? Is not each of them still loved by some soul or other? Why shall I then see in them only matter for detestation, and draw acid from every look, every tone? No, I will love men merely because they are men."—Yes, indeed! friendship may desire merits, but philanthropy only the human form. Hence it is precisely that we have all such a cold changeable love of man, because we confound the worth of men with their claim, and will not love anything about them, but virtues.