I, for my part, if the question is about myself, resolved, half in joke, upon inserting a fine-spun, lucid demand in the Imperial Advertiser, which you perhaps have already read in Rome, without even guessing the author.
"'TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.
"'It may well be taken for granted, that a sound understanding and reason (mens sana in c. s.), next to a clear conscience, holds among the prizeworthy goods of life the highest place,—a proposition which I venture to assume as an axiom with the readers of this paper. As to what may further be said on the subject, as well by as against Kantners, (so Campe writes it, and much more correctly, instead of Kantians,) it does not certainly belong to an entirely popular paper for the people like this present. The undersigned is now in the sorry case that he is obliged here to consult the physicians of Germany and foreign parts. Have sympathy for suffering; send in your answers; say when he is to be (out with it before all Germany!!) completely insane, for as to the beginning thereof the fact has already answered.
"'The when, but not the whether, it now lies with and upon noble philanthropists to answer. Here are my reasons, Germans! Leaving out of sight that many a reason might be deduced from the very publication of this request,—which, to be sure, decides little,—the following items are noticeable and sure:—1. The motley style of the author itself, which is to be known less from this insertion (composed at very considerable intervals) than from the similarity between his style and that of a very favorite and tasteless writer,[[114]] which, denoting a gay exuberance of the most wild and strange images in the head, betokens an approaching crack, as does a motley play of colors upon glass; 2. The prediction of a scamp,[[115]] of which he is always thinking,—a circumstance which must have bad effects; 3. His love and study of Swift, whose madness is no novelty to the learned; 4. His complete loss of memory; 5. His frequent bad trick of confounding things dreamed of with things really experienced, and vice versa; 6. His misfortune not to know what he writes till he has read it over afterward, because he now leaves out something bearing upon his subject, or again puts in something that has nothing to do with it, as the crossed and blotted manuscript unfortunately best proves; 7. His whole previous life, all his thinking and joking, the details under which head it would be tedious here to specify; and, 8. His most unreasonable dreams. Now the question is, when, in such circumstances (that is to say, if no fevers, or cases of love intervene), complete distraction (idea fixa, mania, raptus) comes on. With Swift it fell very late, in old age, when he might already, besides, have been naturally half foolish, and only showed it more afterward. When one considers that Professor Busch once reckoned that his weakness of sight might very well grow upon him from year to year without any serious consequence, because the period of complete blindness fell quite out beyond the end of his whole life, merely upon his grave, so must I assume that my infirmity might swell so gradually, that I should have no occasion for any other petites maisons than the coffin itself; so that I might, in the mean time, have married and held an office as well as any other honest man.
"'My object in this communication is simply to bring myself into correspondence on the subject with some philanthropist or other (he must be, however, a philosophical physician!). My address may be had at the office of the Imperial Advertiser. I make myself, perhaps, more clearly known, bodily and civilly, in this very paper, in the column where I inquire after a wife.
"'Pestitz, February. S——s, L——d, L——r, G——l, S——e.'[[116]]
"Albano, thou knowest under what bush my serious meaning lies hid. The Advertiser of the Empire and of Schoppe has eight reasons for the thing, which are not only my serious meaning, but my fun. Since the Baldhead announced to me the rising of my mad-dog-star after a year, I have always seen the aurora of this fixed star before me, and seen myself thereupon blind and cowardly at last; I must speak it out. O I had in January, brother, eight frightful dreams, one after another, according to the number of reasons assigned in the Advertiser, and themselves appertaining to the eighth,—dreams wherein a Wild Huntsman of the brain went hunting through the mind, and a stream full of worlds, full of faces, and mountains and hands, billowed along, bearing all before it—I will not distress thee with the details,—Dante and his head were heaven to it.
"Then I grew sullen about the matter of cowardice, and said to myself, 'Hast thou hitherto lived so long, and easily flung overboard the richest cargoes, even this world and the next, and divested thyself so clean of everything, even of glory and of books and of hearts, and kept nothing but thyself, in order to stand up therewith free and naked and cold on the ball of earth before the face of the sun, and now must thou unexpectedly cringe before the mere crazy fixed thought of a crazy fixed idea, which any stroke of a feverish pulse, any blow of a fist, any grain of poison may stamp into thy head, and thus must thou throw away at once thy old, godlike freedom?—Schoppe, I know not at all what I am to think of thee! Whoso still fears anything in the universe, and though it were hell itself, he is still a slave!
"Then the man plucked up his manhood and said, 'I will have what I feared'; and Schoppe stepped up nearer to the broad, high cloud, and lo! it was only (one would gladly have put one's self to bed on the spot) the longest dream of the last, long sleep, no more,—what they call madness. Now if one should go for some time into a mad-house, for example, by way of joke, then might one have the dream, if all other things were as well suited to keep the matter in countenance, as in the case of many a one already. And now, thereinto will I gradually sink,—into the dream, where the point of the dagger is broken off against the future, and the rust rubbed off against the past,—where man, undisturbed and alone, is the reigning House in the shadow-realm and Barataria-island of his ideas, and the John Lackland, and, like a philosopher, makes everything that he thinks,—where he also draws his body out of the waves and surges of the external world, and cold and heat and hunger and weak nerves and consumption and dropsy and poverty assail him no more, and no fear, no sin, no error can come near the mind in the mad-house where the three hundred and sixty-five dreams of the nights in the year weave themselves together into a single one, the flying clouds into one great evening red.
"But here lurks something bad! Man must be in a condition to pick out for himself and appropriate with understanding his dream, his good fixed idea,—for a high ant-hill of the most grim and bewitching swims and swarms before him,—otherwise he may fare as ill as if he were still in his senses. I must now, in particular, make my arrangements to find and recognize a good-natured, favorable fixed conceit, which shall deal well with me. If I can bring it about, to be, perhaps, the first man in the crazy house, or the second Momus, or the third Schlegel, or the fourth grace, or the fifth king at cards, or the sixth wise virgin, or the seventh worldly Electorate, or the eighth Wise Man of Greece, or the ninth soul in the ark, or the tenth muse, or the forty-first Academician, or the seventy-first Translator,[[117]] or, in fact, the universe, or, in fact, the universal spirit himself,—then, certainly, my fortune is made, and life's scorpion robbed of his whole sting. But what golden jewel of a fortune does not in addition thereto still stand open? Can I not be a very highly-favored lover, who sees the sun of a beloved sail all day long through heaven, and looks up and cries, 'I see only thy sunny eye, but it contents me!' Can I not be a deceased person, who, full of disbelief in the next world, has made the journey into it, and now does not know at all which way to turn there for joy? O can I not—for the shorter dream and old age do indeed, of themselves, make one childish—be an innocent child again, that plays and knows nothing, that takes all men for its parents, and that has now a tear-drop hanging before him, formed out of the collapsing gay bubble of life, and again sends out the drop through the pipe, blown up into a glimmering little world-globe of colors?